WHITAKER 
Why  callest  thou  me  good? 


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iR&lirrt  HJhtlakrr 


Author  of 

"My  Country  and  Other  I'crsc."  "The  Gospel 
at  Work  in  Modern  Life,"  "The  Wicked- 
ness of  Doing  Xothing,"  "One 
Woman's  ITorth,"  etc. 


PUm.ISIIKD    HY    TIIF. 

PROGRESSIVE   PRESS   PURLISMIXG   COMPANY 

LOS  GATOS,  CALIFORNIA. 

DECEMBER,  1913. 


BY  WAY  OF  EXPLANATION. 

The  following  chapters  were  published  as  a  serial 
in  The  San  Francisco  Bulletin,  in  September.  1913, 
under  the  title,  "The  Confessions  of  a  Clergyman." 
The  title  given  here  is  that  chosen  by  the  author 
himself.  The  Bulletin  had  published  previously  "The 
Confessions  of  Abraham  Ruef,"  "My  Life  in  Prison," 
by  Donald  Lowrie ;  "The  Story  of  Alice  Smith"  and 
"The  Healing  of  Sam  Leake." 

Because  many  have  asked  for  these  chapters  in  more 
connected  form  they  are  given  here-  The  text  is  sub- 
stantially the  same  as  that  which  appeared  in  The 
Bulletin. 


Vrt  • 


CHAPTER  I. 
THE  SHRIVING  OF  THE  Own. 

/      All  my  life  I  have  been  counted  good. 

1  was  reckoned  a  good  boy  at  home.  My  credits  were  al- 
ways high  for  good  conduct  in  school.  I  had  to  an  unusual  de- 
gree the  moral  confidence  of  my  bench-mates  during  my  four 
years  of  factory  life.  During  the  first  two  decades  of  my  life  in 
the  ministry  I  held  positions  of  high  responsibility,  with  never  a 
breath  of  accusation  against  me.  During  the  last  decade  although 
my  opinions  have  been  feared  and  disliked  exceedingly  by  many 
whom  I  formerly  counted  friends  my  bitterest  enemies  in  their 
serious  moods  have  granted  me  moral  standing  as  high  as  I  could 
ask.  Those  who  through  theological  reasoning  think  that  I  am 
a  lost  soul  still  continue  to  call  me  good. 

I  am  stating  the  matter  thus  frankly  neither  because  I  pro- 
]x)se  to  contradict  the  common  verdict,  nor  because  I  have  any 
>ense  of  glorying  in  it.  This  is  not  to  be  the  confession  of  a 
double  life.  Xor  is  it  the  complacent  affirmation  of  a  respectable 
life.  1  am  trying  to  make  clear  first  of  all  just  What  my  own 
experience  has  been  that  I  may  speak  out  of  that  experience  the 
most  heart-searching  convictions  to  which  I  have  come.  I  have 
a  confession  to  make  which  I  think  the  world  needs  just  as 
much  as  it  needs  the  "Prison  Life"  of  Donald  Lowrie,  the  story 
of  "Alice  Smith,"  or  the  record  of  "The  Healing  of  'Sam' 
Leake."  Mine  is  a  more  difficult  story  to  tell  than  theirs.  It  will 
jxissibly  find  less  sympathy  in  respectable  circles  generally  than 
their  dealing  with  moral  struggle  on  the  plane  on  which  they 
have  lived.  One  may  object  to  the  uncovering  of  sores  in  pub- 
lic, even  for  purposes  of  healing.  Rut  there  is  the  advantage  of 
distinctness  when  the  sores  can  be  seen,  and  there  is  a  certain 
satisfaction  in  merely  comparing  sores  with  sores,  or  congratu- 
lating yourself  that  your  own  body  is  free  from  that  sort  of 
thing.  Revelations  of  disease  of  every  kind  appeal  to  something 
i*i  MS  ill.  Call  it  the  morbid  if  you  will,  though  that  is  a  shallow 
term.  It  is  to  me  like  the  fearful  fascination  which  I  felt  as  a 
l<oy  the  first  time  I  hiked  over  the  cliffs  at  Niagara.  Over  the 
edge  of  the  horrible  in  others  we  .look  into  the  abysses  of  the 
l«»ssible  in  ourselves.  There  is  the  fascination,  and  the  danger 
of  it. 

I 'lit  we  do  not  need  to  examine  diseases  so  much  as  we 
need  to  examine  health.  If  doctors  studied  health  more  there 


2. 

would  be  less  disease  to  study.  We  do  not  need  to  analyze  crime 
as  much  as  we  need  to  scrutinize  goodness.  If  goodness  were 
real  crime  would  soon  be  a  vanishing  quantity.  The  trouble 
with  ministers  is  not  that  they  do  not  understand  sin;  it  is  that 
they  do  not  understand  virtue.  He  whom  most  of  our  ministers 
claim  as  Master  was  not  concerned  with  the  crimes  of  Mis  day : 
He  was  concerned  over  the  goodness  of  His  day.  Jesus  did  not 
attack  the  vice  of  His  time.  He  attacked  the  virtue  of  His  time. 
At  no  point  is  the  common  misunderstanding  of  Him  more  pro- 
found today. 

I  did  not  say  that  doctors  needed  to  admire  health  more, 
though  what  I  said  will  be  so  understood  by  many  at  the  first 
reading.  .They  admire  health  too  much  now,  that  is  such  health 
as  we  have.  If  they  were  not  so  soon  satisfied  with  a  superficial 
physical  well-being  most  diseases  would  be  defeated  before  they 
were  ever  manifested.  Neither  would  I  be  understood  as  stand- 
ing for  a  minute  for  that  easy  moral  complacency  which  is  con- 
tent to  approve  ordinarily  nice  and  decent  living  and  ignore  the 
doings  of  the  disreputable,  except  in  a  coercive,  legal  way.  It  is 
exactly  this  attitude  which  I  fear  and  detest.  Mere  admiration 
of  goodness  is  the  last  mood  in  the  world  that  we  need.  What 
I  do  mean  to  say  is  that  more  than  a  better  understanding  of 
crime,  however'  important  that  may  be,  we  need  a  better  under- 
standing of  what  we  commonly  call  morality,  and  that  if  we  were 
sound  in  our  thinking  about  morality  there  would  soon  be  little 
need  to  think  about  crime.  It  is  because  we  have  not  gotten 
hold  of  what  goodness  is  that  we  are  trying  so  hard  to  under- 
stand what  evil  is.  And  though  there  may  be  large  benefit  in 
this,  both  the  world  and  the  church  are  going  at  the  thing  from 
the  wrong  end. 

The  church  has  always  made  too  much  of  sin,  though  in  a 
different  way  from  that  in  which  the  misnamed  "muck-rakers" 
of  our  time  have  undertaken  to  save  the  world.  The  muck- 
rakers  have  dealt  with  social,  the  church  has  dealt  more  with 
individual  sin.  The  muck-rakers  have  handled  wrong-doing  in 
the  present,  and  in  the  concrete ;  the  church  has  handled  evil  in 
its  origin,  and  in  its  "nature  more.  But  both  have  emphasized 
and  do  emphasize  rather  the  negative  than  the  affirmative  side 
of  life,  and  both  have  failed  in  the  main  to  see  that  the  real 
trouble  is  not  with  the  badness,  but  with  the  goodness  of  men. 
Tesus  saw  this  and  said  it,  and  therefore  the  "good"  people  of 
.  His  day  put  him  to  death. 

And  it  is  at  this  very  point  of  judging  badness,  as  T  am 
going  to,  show,  that  the  chief  demerit  of  our  goodness  appears. 
The  deepest  test  of  virtue  is  its  opinion  of  vice,  or  perhaps  it 


3. 

were  better  to  say  that  the  severest  test  of  the  virtuous  is  theif 
attitude  toward  the  vicious.  Generally  speaking,  it  is  more 
vicious  than  vice  itself.  It  is  here  that  the  largest  justification 
of  our  muck-rakers  appears.  All  men  who  show  what  a  human 
thing  sin  is  .help  to  humanize  the  attitude  of  goodness  toward  it. 
They  help  the  good  more  than  they  help  the  bad.  And  this  is 
the  heart  of  my  contention,  whether  you  approve  it  or  not.  All 
that  I  want  just  now  is  that  you  shall  try  to  understand  it.  The 
first  great  moral  need  of  the  world  is  to  help  the  good,  not  to 
help  the  bad.  The  story  of  "Alice  Smith"  was  not  chiefly  valu- 
able for  the  hope  that  it  put  into  the  hearts  of  the  underworld. 
It  was  chiefly  valuable  for  the  humanizing  ministry  which  it 
wrought  in  some  hearts  here  and  there  in  the  upperworld.  I 
am  glad  if  it  spoke  with  saving  power  to  some  publicans,  but  I 
rejoice  more  that  it  actually  punctured  the  moral  epidermis  of 
some  Pharisees.  And  the  pity  of  it  is  not  that  some  of  the 
underworld  mocked  it  and  would  not  understand  it.  The 
greater  pity  by  far  is  that  so  many  of  the  good  hardened  the 
crust  of  their  goodness  lest  it  should  find  their  hearts  also  and 
bring  them  to  see  their  proprieties  and  their  pieties  for  the  piti- 
ful things  which  they  are. 

Therefore  is  it  important  that  since  a  woman  and  a  man 
have  both  made  confession  of  their  badness  someone  should 
make  confession  now  for  the  good.  And  I  repeat  that  it  is 
harder  to  confess  the  good  than  it  is  to  confess  the  bad?  It  is 
harder  to  find  a  confessor.-  Shall  we  confess  to  the  bad?  And 
if  we  confess  to  the  good  will  they  not  feel  that  we  are  attack" 
ing  them  under  guise  of  shriving  ourselves?  Resides,  what 
tangible  thing  is  there  to  confess?  Original  sin.  of  course. 
But  the  day  for  mourning  that  except  in  the  way  of  theological 
make-believe  is  gone.  Our  every  day  misadventures  of  temper 
and  word?  Such  confession  is  only  superficially  satisfying.  Yet 
few  of  us  see  any  deeper.  WhittHer  was  one  of  the  rare  souls 
who  understood.  You  remember  that  in  that  fine  "swan-song" 
of  his  "At  Last,"  he  says  significantly: 

"Suffice  it  if  mv  good  and  ill  unreckoned, 
And  BOTH  FORGIVEN  by  Thy  abounding  grace." 
I  have  always  thought  that  one  of  the  deepest  words  which 
\Yhitticr  ever  wrote.    Only  lately  have  I  come  to  see  how  deep 
it  is.     And  I  am  but  feeling  my  way  in  this  confession  to  that 
which  I  know  needs  to  be  said  so  that  many  more  shall  think 
it  out  for  themselves,  and  understand.     I  owe  the  keener  appre- 
ciation of  this  truth  which  has  been  growing  ii|)on  me  for  years 
to  my  recent  reading  of  the  story  of  "Alice  Smith"  and  "The 
Healing  of  'Sam'  Leake."  and  the  thinking  which  I  have  done 


4. 

with  respect  to  them  both.  I  am  goingi  to  try  to  be  as  frank  as 
they  were,  though  in  a  different  direction.  Like  them  also  I 
have  found  a  way  out  which  I  am  trying  to  follow  with  what 
strength  I  can.  I  shall  try  not  to  dogmatize  about  it,  and  not 
to  preach  overmuch.  And  if  sometimes  my  language  sounds 
extravagant  I  am  nevertheless  writing  in  all  seriousness,  and 
never  more  so  than  when  I  use  paradox  and  hyperbole  to 
awaken  if  possible  the  understanding  and  conscience  of  the 
most  difficult  class  in  the  community  to  save — the  good. 


CHAPTER  II. 
MINISTERS  AND  MEN. 

My  father  used  to  tell  the  story  of  a  man  in  England 
who  prayed  after  this  fashion,  to  the  scandal  of  some  of  the 
staid  religious  people  of  his  time :  "O  Lord,  bless  the  bad ; 
Thou  hast  blessed  the  good  in  making  them  good ;  no  »v,  there- 
fore, bless  those  who  have  need  of  it ;  bless  the  bad.'' 

There  may  have  been  some  satire  in  the  prayer,  as  there 
plainly  was  in  the  famous  retort  of  Jesus  to  the  Pharisee,  "I 
am  not  come  to  call  the  righteous  but  sinners  to  repentance.'' 
Perhaps  the  man  of  English  story  thought  to  get  under  the 
self-complacent  comfortableness  of  the  good  folks  around  him 
by  reminding  them  of  the  fortune  which  was  already  theirs  and 
thus  to  shame  them  out  of  their  smug  self-absorption. 

It  is  plain  enough  that  Jesus  thought  the  hardest  people  in 
the  world  to^  get  to  understand  themselves  were  those  who  are 
reckoned  good.  On  them  he  used  the  back-stroke  of  satire 
and  the  forward  lashing  of  out-and-out  anathema,  and  to  a 
large  extent  used  them  both  in  vain.  He  turned  to  the  sinners 
because  the  sinners  are  the  most  hopeful  class  in  the  world. 

One  remark  which  father  made  years  ago  Imrt  me  consid- 
erably at  the  time.  I  was  already  pledged  to  the  ministry,  and 
with  his  entire  approval  and  consent.  He  himself  was  a  loyal 
church  member  for  more  than  fifty  years,  and  a  deacon  for  a 
good  portion  of  that  time.  Although  a  "Non-Conformist,"  to 
use  the  English  term,  he  had  always  that  high  sense  of  rever- 
ence for  the  church  and  all  its  appointments  which  had  been 
deeply  grained  in  him  as  a  child  in  the  Anglican  communion. 
Moreover,  his  i>ersonal  relations  with  clergymen  of  every  creed 
were  of  the  most  cordial  type.  Our  home  during  my  boyhood 
days  was  ever  open  to  the  minister,  and  the  best  that  we  had 
to  give  was  never  lacking  when  the  minister  sat  at  our  Ixiard. 
And  if  my  father  admired  a  good  book  much,  he  was  even 
quicker  to  discern  and  to  appreciate  a  good  sermon. 

Yet  this  he  said,  and  in  no  moment  of  aggravation,  nor  in 
any  cynical  mood.  The  quietness  and  deliberateness  of  the  ut- 
terance was  what  gave  it  for1  me  its  sharpest  sting. 

"If  I  were  looking  for  the  highest  type  of  character."  he 
remarked  thoughtfully  one  day,  "I  would  not  look  to  the  min- 
istry for  it." 

Now   I   know  ministers  today  very  much  better  than   my 


6. 

father  ever  knew  them :  that  is,  I  know  them  in  a  far  more  in- 
timate way.  They  have  been  my  personal  and  professional  as- 
sociates for  thirty  years.  I  have  had  more  or  less  direct  per- 
sonal knowledge  of  many  hundreds  of  them,  East,  West,  North 
and  South,  on  the  home  field  and  the  foreign  field,  and  of 
nearly  every  communion  under  the  sun.  When  I  hear  other 
people  talk  of  ministers  in  the  glib  fashion  in  which  they  often 
do  today,  I  sometimes  wonder  how  many  of  them  they  have 
actually  known. 

I  have  not  found  ministers  very  different  from  other  men, 
lawyers  or  doctors,  commercial  men  or  farmers,  university  pro- 
fessors or — convicts.  Indeed,  I  have  found  all  men  very  much 
alike.  If  I  were  looking  for  the  highest  type  of  character  I 
would  not  look  for  it  exclusively  or  emphatically  in  any  par- 
ticular place  or  profession.  I  have  found  as  fine  exhibitions  of 
moral  quality  in  the  penitentiary  as  I  have  found  anywhere, 
and  as  poor  exhibits  in  the  church  and  the  university.  This  is 
not  saying  that  the  average  of  character  is  as  high  in  prison 
as  it  is  in  pew  and  pulpit,  or  in  the  professor's  chair.  It  is  but 
admitting  what  a  very  varied  experience  and  observation  of 
men  has  taught  me :  that  character  is  not  a  monopoly  of  men 
of  any  creed  or  condition.  And  the  finest  flowers  of  charac- 
ter are  sometimes  found  in  the  most  unlikely  places. 

I  do  not  agree  even  with  the  ordinary  impression  that 
women  are  naturally  better  than  men.  Their  circumstances 
are  often  morally  more  fortunate,  especially  as  regards  the  re- 
straining influence  of  public  opinion,  but  they  are  not  essen- 
tially either  better  or  worse  than  men.  If  I  were  looking  for 
the  highest  type  of  character  I  would  not  have  regard  to  sex. 
Conventional  goodness,  negative  moral  abstinence,  may  be 
more  common  with  women  than  with  men.  But  the  conven- 
tional verdict  as  to  their  superior  virtue  is  either  a  part  of  the 
effervescence  of  flattery  which  overflows  all  ordinary  talk 
about  women  in  respectable  circles,  or  else  it  is  an  expression 
of  the  common  confounding  of  morality  and  propriety,  the 
general  failure  to  recognize  what  goodness  really  is.  Real 
strength  of  character  is  as  rare  among  women  as  it  is  among 
men. 

It  is  rare  in  the  ministry ;  not  rarer,  however,  I  think,  than 
in  any  other  profession.  I  have  found  a  great  deal  of  fine, 
thoroughly  human  quality  among  ministers.  No  class  suffers 
more  today  from  caricature  than  do  the  clergy.  The  average 
minister  of  fiction  is  quite  fictitious.  The  ordinary  soapbox 
orator  who  berates  the  preacher  knows  less  of  the  preacher 
than  the  preacher  knows  about  him.  There  is  only  one  class 


7. 

of  people  who  know  /ministers  better  than  they  know  them- 
selves, and  thej-  are — ministers'  wives.  And  too  often  the 
minister's  wile  is  as  p  athetically  pious  in  her  perspective  as  he. 

The  largest  lack  of  the  ministry  on  the  moral  side  is  the 
human  quality.  There  is  much  of  it  among  themselves.  Mo 
men  are  more  wholesomely  entertaining  when  quite  by  them- 
selves than  are  ministers.  Their  conversation,  with  tne  very 
rarest  exceptions,  is  clean.  Their  interchange  of  personal 
pleasantries,  save  for  a  very  occasional  "grouch"  among  them, 
is  kind.  They  indulge  very  little  in  the  diction  of  the  dollar, 
and  in  either  woman  like  chatter  about  clothes  or  the  man-of- 
the  street's  braying  about  bargains.  They  have  more  admin- 
istrative ability  witnin  the  lines  of  their  training  and  experience 
than  have  most  of  their  fellows  who  think  them  lacking  in  busi- 
ness sense.  I  have  "known  a  few  ministers  who  have  turned 
from  the  church  to  commercial  life,  and  an  astonishingly  large 
number  of  them  have  succeeded  to  an  extraordinary  degree. 

"If  1  had  a  son  who  was  a  fool  I  would  make  a  parson  of 
him,"  said  an  English  boor  to  the  Rev.  Sidney  Smith. 

"Evidently  your  father  did  not  think  so/'  was  the  famous 
wit's  quick  and  crushing  reply. 

And  I  am  very  sure  that  no  one  thinks  so  of  the  ministry, 
who  knows  ministers  for  the  kind  of  men  they  actually  are. 

The  most  serious  fault  of  ministers  is  their  religiousness. 
I  did  not  say  their  religion.  The  genuine  among  them,  and 
most  of  them  at  least  mean  to  be  genuine,  have  a  saving  amount 
of  real  religion,  which  crops  out  more  in  some  of  them  when 
they  are  swapping  stories  than  it  does  when  they  are  preach- 
ing sermons.  The  humanness  of  ministers  is  nowhere  so  evi- 
dent as  in  their  humor.  It  is  when  they  are  serious,  or  think 
they  are.  that  many  of  them  are  most  unreal,  and  most  lacking 
in  profoundly  human  feeling. 

This  story  was  told  me  years  ago,  by  some  sanctimonious 
sinner  of  the  cloth  whose  name  I  am  very  glad  to  have  forgot- 
ten. 

A  minister  had  preached  a  very  searching  Sunday  evening 
sermon.  One  man  was  deeply  touched,  and  almost  persuaded 
He  followed  the  minister  out  of  doors,  and  on  the  way  home, 
half  in  mind  to  speak  to  him.  As  he  lingered  behind  diffidently, 
he  heard  the  minister  telling  some  funny  story,  and  laughing, 
and  was  so  disgusted  that  he  turned  away,  and  presumably  was 
— lost. 

Now  that  kind  of  story  will  appeal  to  a  grxid  many  min- 
isters yet,  as  it  did  to  me  in  a  sort  of  condemnatory  war  once 
on  a  time.  Yet  it  comes  nearer  to  'telling  what  is  the  matter 


8. 

with  the  churches  than  whole  volumes  of  essays  on  the  sub- 
ject, when  it  is  taken  in  just  the  opposite  way  from  that  in 
which  it  is  intended  to  be  taken. 

The  trouble  with  ministers  is  not  that  they  are  quite  natural- 
ly and  unaffectedly  human  after  preaching;  the  trouble  is  that 
they  are  not  more  so  while  they  are  preaching.  Piosity  is  the 
prime  sin  of  the  pulpit,  and  of  all  our  religious  life.  Abso- 
lutely the  rottenest  men  that  I  have  known  in  the  ministry 
have  been  men  of  the  ultra  pious  type.  If  ministers  could  be 
as  genuine  in  the  pulpit  as  most  of  them  are  out  of  it  there 
would  be  vastly  less  of  religiousness  and  vastly  more  of  reli- 
gion in  the  world.  They  are  never  really  of  such  little  use 
to  bad  men  as  when  they  are  trying  hardest  themselves  to 
seem  good. 

More  humanness.  not  just  more  humor,  is  what  the  min- 
istry needs.  Don't  print  that  more  humane-ness,  Mr.  Com- 
positor, for  that  isn't  what  I  mean.  Most  of  our  humane- 
ness has  the  camphor  smell  of  charity  about  it.  No ;  more 
human-ness,  that  is  it. 

Great,  big,  whole-souled,  human  Phillips  Brooks  rode  all 
(hy  with  a  New  Hampshire  stage  driver,  on  the  outside  of 
the  stage.  The  conversation  was  not  "religious"  and  P>rooks 
did  not  give  any  hint  that  he  was  a  clergyman.  When  the 
ride  was  done  the  stage  driver  gave  P> rooks  a  most  hearty 
handshake,  and  said.  "I'm  darned  glad  to  have  had  you  along 
with  me  today.  Tt  seems  good  to  have  a  chance  to  talk  with 
a  'man.  I  hain't  had  nothing  but  women  and  preachers  all 
summer." 

I  suspect  that  story  was  made  up,  but  there  is  no  doubt 
that  P>rooks  was  human,  both  when  he  preached  and  after- 
war  1.  He  was  one  of  the  very  rare  good  men.  either  in  or  out 
of  the  ministrv,  whose  goodness  is  not  in  danger  of  becom- 
ing like  Peter's  most  religious  mood,  a  "stumbling-block  and 
an  offense." 


CHAPTER  III. 
THE  MISSIONARY  MOOD. 

After  four  years  of  student  ''supplying''  all  up  an  1  down 
New  England,  during  which  time  I  preached  in  all  ..u  Xe\\ 
England  States  except  Connecticut,  I  began  my  won;  in  the 
regular  ministry,  immediately  following  my  ordinatit..i.  as  a 
missionary  in  old  Mexico. 

I  have  wondered  often  of  late  years  how  much  there  was 
of  real  human  interest  in  the  motives  which  took  m  to  the 
mission  field.  Was  it  an  effort  to  reach  the  acme  of  human 
goodness  at  a  hound?  Was  it  the  good  opinion  of  my  fel- 
lows in  the  faith  which  I  sought?  Was  it  real  concern  ot 
any  tangible  sort  for  the  Mexicans  with  whom  I  proposed  to 
make  my  home  and  my  ministry?  Is  missionary  goodness  a» 
exception  to  the  general  want  of  the  human  quality  among 
the  good? 

Of  this  I  am  quite  certain :  That  my  motives  were  not 
mercenary.  The  salary  for  myself  and  wife  was  $1000  a  year. 
This  was  equal  at  that  time  to  about  $1300  (pesos)  in  Mexican 
money.  We  paid  $20  a  month  for  missionary  headquarters. 
We  were  forced  to  keep  servants,  although  the  cost  of  such 
service  was  shamefully  small.  There  was.  of  course,  consid- 
erable company  to  entertain,  and,  as  the  representatives  of  our 
church  among  a  foreign  and  not  wholly  friendly  people  we  were 
under  the  necessity  of  presenting  a  respectable  appearance.  Our 
stay  there  lasted  but  a  year,  and  it  was  with  me  on  account  of 
the  alkali  in  the  water,  and  the  elevation  at  which  we  lived,  an 
almost  continual  battle  with  sickness,  from  which  1  barelv  es- 
caped with  my  life.  We  did  not  run  behind  that  year,  but  we 
did  not  save  anything,  and,  we  lived,  as  I  have  always  lived, 
the  simple  life. 

From  my  own  experience  and  a  considerable  observation 
among  misionaries  I  am  quite  sure  that  as  a  class  they  are 
neither  overpaid  nor  covetous  of  commercial  reward.  They 
are  waited  UJXMI  more  than  ministers  and  ministers'  families  at 
home,  because  their  work  takes  them  into  regions  generally 
where  the  "white  man's  burden"  usually  includes  a  good-sized 
retinue  of  servants,  and  where  all  kinds  of  lalx>r  service  is 
cheap.  They  are  more  regularly  paid  than  multitudes  of  the 
poorer  paid  ministry  at  home,  for  the  ethics  of  the  churches  in 
respect  to  keeping  faith  in  a  financial  way  with  those  who 


10. 

preach  the  gospel  to  them  are  notoriously  bad.  Many  of  our 
home  churches  are  positively  indecent  when  it  comes  to  paying 
the  preacher. 

This  thing  actuallv  happened  in  California,  and  not  so  very 
far  away  from  San  Francisco.  A  minister  of  unimpeachable 
character,  and  good  intellectual  ability,  was  serving  a  "home 
mission"  church.  He  had  a  wife  and  five  children  to  support. 
His  salary  was  $800  a  year.  The  salary  was  paid  in  the  most 
irregular  fashion.  His  own  contribution  to  the  collection  box 
was  twenty-five  cents  a  Sunday,  which  was  always  paid.  One 
Sunday  evening  the  church  treasurer  handed  him  this  amount, 
the  total  receipts  of  the  day,  and  without  a  word  of  apology 
but  with  a  whimsical  smile,  remarked,  "Well.  Brother  Blank, 
you  are  sure  of  this  amount  anyway."  And  this  was  a  decid- 
edly orthodox  church.  Of  course,  it  was  an  extreme  case,  but 
I  have  known  others  in  all  essential  particulars  just  as  bad. 

The  missionary  does  not  have  to  meet  quite  this  sort  of 
thing,  which  is  one  reason,  I  venture  to  say.  why  seme  of  them 
prefer  the  foreign  field.  But  as  a  class  they  make  less  of 
money  than  the  ministry  at  home,  and  that's  much  less 
than  many  people  suppose.  Half  our  criticism  of  good 
people  falls  flat  because  it  does  not  go  deep  enough.  The  sup- 
posed coveteousness  of  the  clergy  is  generallv  imaginary,  be- 
cause no  one  but  a  fool  would  go  into  the  ministry  for  salary. 
There  are  exceptions,  of  course,  because  there  are  fool*  in  the 
ministry  as  there  are  everywhere  else. 

The  largest  cost  of  missionary  service  to  the  man  who 
undertakes  it  i<*  th"  isolation  of  it.  Xn  one  can  understand  just 
what  that  is  who  has  not  experienced  it. 

I  came  across  an  old  Mexican  photograph  the  other  dnv. 
It  was  a  picture  of  two  young  men,  one  of  them  my  "native 
assistant"  in  my  early  days  in  Mexico.  He  was  a  keen  and  ap- 
parently kind  fellow,  for  whom  I  confess  a  good  deal  of  affec- 
tion to  this  day,  although  he  played  me  false.  Under  cover  of 
my  unacciuaintance  with  the  language  and  the  city  he  lived 
a  double  life,  to  the  scandal'  or  the  amusement  of  the  natives, 
according  to  their  point  of  view.  I  found  him  out  and  re- 
ported him,  as  I  .was  compelled  to  do,  to  headquarters  in  Mex- 
ico City,  where  he  was  immediately  recalled.  I  did  not  keep 
the  letter  which  our  superintendent  wrote  me.  but  T  well  re- 
member certain  words  which  he  wrote.  He  had  been  there  a 
considerable  number  of  veqrs.  This  was  what  he  said : 

"If  ever  an  honest  Mexican  is  found  they  ought  to  blaze 
his  name  in  letters  of  light  on  the  sides  of  Popocatapetl." 

This  superintendent  was  a  forceful,  energetic,  outspoken 


11. 

man.  He  was  at  that  time,  to  all  appearances,  a  thorough- go- 
ing Protestant.  I  remember  he  £uid  to  me  in  his  own  home 
when  I  visited  him  in  Mexico  City  some  months  afterward: 
"Whitaker,  I  have  been  a'  missionary  in  India  among  th? 
heathen,  and  I  tell  you  I  would  rather  try  to  tell  the  gospel  i-j 
the  heathen  than  to  these  people." 

Five  years  ago  I  read  with  more  than  ordinary  surprise 
that  this  superintendent  had  just  been  received  into  the  Rjiuan 
Catholic  Church  in  Mexico  City. 

The  explanations  offeree!  \vcrc  imnv.  anrl  rrt  all  com- 
plimentary to  him.  Irritation  at  missionary  management  was 
one  of  them.  Another  and  deeper  was  desire  for  seme  decisive 
authority  and  surcease  from  uncertainties.  l>oth  in  respect  t> 
dogma  and  to  deed.  Another  was  his  intimacy  with  men  of  a 
Wrongly  influential  type.  Perhaps  all  of  these  things  had  some- 
what to  do  with  it.  When  I  wrote  to  him  he  wrote  me  a  great 
heart  message  in  reply,  lie  had  not  bettered  himself  in  a  ma- 
terial way  by  the  change. 

I  think  myself  it  was  because  he  was  a  little  ni;>rc  human 
than  most  missionaries  that  his  creed  gave  way.  He  had  live  1 
among  the  people  so  long  that  he  hid  to  be  one  of  them.  He 
was  heart  hungry  to  identifv  himself  with  his  fellows.  I  am 
not  justifying  his  change.  The  creed  of  Cath  l;cism  does  not 
appeal  to  me.  I  am  simply  trying  to  understand  him  an  1 
interpret  him.  And  whether  you  think  of  his  course  as  weak 
or  strong.  I  wish  you  might  think  of  it  with  in?  f^r  a  moment 
quite  apart  from  the  theology  or  ccclcsiasticism  of  th  •  thing 
which  he  did.  He  would  have  1  ecu  a  more  respectable  ma:i. 
I  suppose,  if  he  had  n-  t  changed.  Consistency  in  cut  ward 
demeanor  is  a  kind  of  Kohinoor  with  respectable  people.  It 
is  vulgar  to  be  vaccilating.  you  know.  I  Hit  think  <  f  him.  if 
you  can.  as  swept  on  tides  of  the  human  i"t<>  a  j^rcat  sen*e 
of  sympathy  and  surrender »of  fellowship  with  his  kind.  He 
wanted  to  be  more  than  a  mission-in1,  be  wanted  to  be  just  a 
man  among  his  fellow  men.  And  if  thev.  the  great  bulking 
human  mas*  around  him.  had  been  Buddhists,  lie  might  have 
been  a  Buddhist,  too. 

There  are  a  lot  of  £<x>d  people  who  will  think  (his  shock- 
ingly superficial,  not  because  it  is.  but  because  g  >odncs->  i"  >r 
them  is  so  bound  up  with  certain  sets  of  accepted  ideas.  S  me 
of  them  go  as  missionaries  primarily  because  thev  think  their 
set  of  ideas  is  better  than  the  other  man's  set  of  ideas.  It  is  a 
fearful  thin<j  to  fall  awav  from  their  set  of  idea*.  The  man 
who  does  this  •  <  a  pervert.  It  is  a  Messed  thing  to  accent  their 
set  of  ideas.  The  man  who  does  this  is  a  convert.  Whether 


12. 

he  is  human  or  not  they  have  not  thought,  because  the  human 
for  them  is  not  something  to  be  sought  after,  it  is  something 
to  be  feared 

Even  the  heartache  of  the  missionary's  isolation  only  makes 
them  long  the  more  for  the  family-bound  fellowship  of  their 
own  intellectual  breed.  They  can  not  be  comfortable  outside 
of  their  own  conventions. 

Looking  back  now  I  know  that  I  learned  more  from  my 
servants  in  Mexico  than  I  learned  from  anybody  else,  or  than 
anybody  else  learned  from  me.  I  paid  them,  man  and  wife.  $0 
a  month — half  of  this  as  wrages,  half  of  it  for  their  keep. 
That  was  higher  than  the  average  wage,  which  was  $5  a 
month  for  man  and  wife,  with  a  few  frijoles  (beans)  and  tor- 
tillas (corn  cakes)  on  which  to  live. 

It  hurt  my  conscience  a  little  even  then.  But  I  felt  then, 
as  most  missionaries  feel,  and  most  respectable  people  every- 
where, for  that  matter,  how  beautiful  is  patronage.  I  hate 
the  thing  now.  This  is  the  fundamental  immorality  of  all  our 
missionary  endeavor,  whether  we  define  missions  in  terms  of 
religion  or  terms  of  business.  Mission  work  is  simply  one 
form  of  "doing  good,"  and  "doing  good"  is  the  devil's  up-to- 
date  away  of  keeping  people  from  the  one  thing  needful,  which 
is  just — doing  right. 

I  came  out  of  Mexico  almost  as  ignorant  as  I  went  in- 
Of  course  I  had  picked  up  some  bric-a-brac  of  conversational 
conveniences  and  lecture  equipment  with  which  to  entertain 
respectable  people  here  and  make  them  feel  more  fortunate 
and  respectable.  F>ut  all  that  I  brought  out  of  Mexico  of  any 
great  value  was  what  Marcelino  and  Juanita  taught  me — God 
rest  their  spirits !  In  my  conceit  I  did  not  know  they  had 
taught  me  anything.  But  the  seed  of  their  service  was  in  me. 

He  was  an  ignorant  peon,  she  of  the  same  common  class. 
They  had  been  "converted"  before*  I  knew  them  to  the  same 
shallow  and  respectable  gospel  which  I  held.  But  because  they 
were  so  much  the  same  and  because  they  were  unwittingly  even 
more  human,  they  planted  the  seeds  in  me  of  a  democracy  of 
which  they  themselves  had  never  dreamed.  I  was  to  them  the 
missionary,  the  superior,  the  almoner  of  the  goodness  of  God, 
"to  whom  God  in  His  infinite  wisdom  had  entrusted"  not  the 
coal  and  other  treasures  of  the  earth,  as  Mr.  Baer  put  it  once 
on  a  time  in  the  antediluvian  ages  of  our  social  consciousness, 
but  the  far  mightier  treasures  of  competence,  of  culture  and 
of  character  as  we  are  still  putting  it  in  respectable  circles 
everywhere  whenever  we  talk  of  the  missionary  spirit  and 
plume  ourselves  on  our  pretty  ways  of  doing  good. 


13. 

They  accepted  us  at  our  own  estimate  and  never  thought 
of  disputing  it.  But  unwittingly  they  disturbed  that  estimate 
in  me.  Whether  they  are  living  or  dead  today  I  know  not.  I 
only  know  that  they  helped  me  more  than  all  the  men  of  my 
own  station  whom  I  met  in  Mexico,  and  more  than  all  the  mis- 
sionaries whom  I  have  known,  to  realize  what  a  dangerous 
denial  of  fundamental  democracy  lies  under  the  surface  of 
every  missionary  mood. 


,.  .:.  CHAPTER  iv.  :;rr  ,  'rr.. 

SLUM  \YORK  IN  SEATTLE. 

Seattle,  when  I  reached  that  city  about  the  1st  of  Septem- 
ber. 1888,  xvas  claiming  loudly  a  population  of  forty  thousand. 
1  had  almost  written  it  forty  thousand  souls,  but  the  town  cared 
very  little  whether  they  were  souls  or  not.  Tacoma  estimated 
the  population  of  Seattle  at  the  same  time  as  not  to  •xcee;l 
thirty  thousand,  and  claimed  to  have  as  many  residents  of  her 
own.  The  two  towns  were  running  neck  and  neck  for  the 
primacy  on  Puget  Sound. 

My  invitation  to  Seattle  was  for  three  months.  Afterward 
I  accepted  a  call  to  the  regular  pastorate  for  a  year,  so  that 
my  stay  there  altogether  was  fifteen  months. 

One  of  the  incidents  of  my  ministry  there  was  the  com- 
ing of  D.  L.  Moody  for  union  evangelistic  meetings  in  the  big 
Armory  building. 

I  remember  but  one  of  Moody 's  sermons,  though  I  ad- 
mired then*  all  at  the  time.  This  was  his  well  known  discourse 
f.n  the  text,  "Whatsoever  a  man  soweth,  that  shall  he  also 
reap."  I  heard  him  preach  it  years  afterward  in  California, 
with  very  little  change.  It  was  evidently  a  message  which  he 
felt  very  much. 

Moody  was  more  human  than  most  ministers,  but  his 
humanness  showed  itself  sometimes  in  severe  ways. 

I  was  among  the  workers  in  his  "inquiry  meeting"  otre 
ni^ht — ;ndeed,  every  night  that  he  was  there,  I  think.  This 
particular  evening  I  had  just  finished  talking  and  praying  with 
a  man  upon  whom  the  sermon  of  the  hour  before  had  made  a 
serious  and  wholesome  impression. 

As  I  straightened  up  and  looked  around  Mr.  Moody  saw 
me.  He  beckoned  to  me  with  his  finger,  as  one  accustomed 
to  "ive  orders,  and  on  my  approach  he  said  in  his  brusque 
fashion,  indicating  two  young  women  with  whom  he  had  been 
engaged  in  conversation : 

"Here,  talk  to  these  girls ;  they'd  just  as  lief  go  to  hell  as 
not." 

The  girls  giggled  as  the  great  evangelist  turned  away. 
They  had  been  flattered  by  the  personal  attention  of  the  fa- 
in on «  man,  but  they  had  no  real  interest  in  anything  I  had, 
to  sav, 


is. 

There  is  another  girl  figure  which  lingers  with'  me  among 
my  memories  of  Seattle.  I  write  of  her  with  some  hesitation, 
for  I  never  spoke  to  her.  and  she  was  the  first  of  her  kind  I 
had  ever  fairly  seen.  But  the  remembrance  of  the  evangelist's 
emphasis  upon  the  law  of  retribution,  and  the  recollection  of 
that  hit  cf  brusqueness  with  which  he  handed  over  to  me  the 
tv.o  ligfit-headed  yr.ung  women  in  that  meeting  of  a  quarter 
century  ago  brings  back  to  me  with  a  kind  of  heart-sickening 
vividness  the  intimacy,  and  even  homelikeness.  of  the  other 
scene. 

It  was  after  the  great  fire  of  the  6th  of  June.  1889.  I  had 
seen  the  city  all  but  wiped  out  in  a  few  hours.  I  had  seen  it 
l.ihli  a'jain  almost  before  the  ashes  were  cold.  And  as  pas- 
tor of  one  of  the  most  prominent  churches  in  the  citv  I  had 
ventured  at  length,  on  the  solicitation  of  some  of  my  members, 
to  make  a  personal  investigation  of  the  slums  which  had 
c;ro\v!:  up  under  cover  of  the  swift  "and  superficial  rebuilding 
of  certain  sections  of  the  town,  and  had  taken  liberties  which 
they  had  never  dared  to  take  before  the  fire  had  burned  away 
the  barriers  of  decency  and  order. 

I  can  see  the  thinis  now  almost  as  vividly  as  T  saw  it 
then..  The  segregated  district  filled  nil  the  sorlet-lighted  al-ev- 
wav  in  the  rear  of  the  saloons  which  lined  thickly  one  of  the 
main  thoroughfares  of  South  Seattle.  The  buildings  used  hv 
the  women  were  but  flimsy  "cribs."  their  doors  flaring  wide 
open  to  the  night.  The  men  shambled  with  a  slouching  curi- 
osity, and  a  general  air  of  moral  sloveliness,  up  and  down  the 
narrow  passageway.  The  women — there  is  no  need  to  men- 
tion them.  One  of  them  only  fixed  her  features  in  my  mind. 
She  stood  ''n  her  f1rv>rwnv.  parleying  w'th  a  ynmg  man.  I  saw 
the  door  close  behind  him,  saw  the  flash  of  her  arm  as  she 
drew  down  the  telltale  curtain,  saw  the  hard  look  in  her  face 
and  the  sharp  triumph  with  which  she  gloated  over  the  sordid 
success  she  had  won. 

1  fers  was  a  stronger  face  than  the  face  of  either  girl  whom 
Mr.  Moody  turned  over  to  me.  There  was  character  there, 
though  character  fearfully  out  of  ioint.  And  I  was  more  help- 
less bv  far  to  help  her  than  Mr.  Moody  had  been  with  the  two 
young  girls. 

When  f  turned  away  T  felt  as  thoiv/h  I  had  seen  my  sis- 
ter walk  into  an  open  cesspool,  and  for  fear  of  soiling  myself 
!  had  not  been  able  to  so  much  as  throw  her  a  rope. 

I  threw  a  rope  in  my  congregation  next  Sunday,  but  it 
was  a  whip  of  small  cords,  They  winced  a  little  at  the  plain- 


16. 

ness  of  my  speech,  although  most  of  my  lashing  was  aimed 
over  their  shoulders  at  the  city  officials. 

Afterward  I  talked  with  the  Chief  of  Police,  or  it  may 
have  been  before.  1  do  not  remember  his  name.  I  remember 
only  his  expression.  He  Jiad  the  look  of  an  old  doctor  who  is 
sure  that  tlit  ~ase  is  hopeless,  but  is  equally  certain  that  the 
young  doctor  will  have  to  find  it  out  for  himself. 

1  have  seen  something  of  police  graft,  and  the  stupidities 
of  prison  officials,  but  I  do  not  think  these  are  the  most  seri- 
ous difficulties  we  have  to  meet  in  correcting  our  criminal  pro- 
cedure. The  deficiencies  of  our  best  jailers  are  more  disturb- 
ing in  a  way  than  the  deficiencies  of  our  worst;  they  are  so 
much  harder  to  get  at. 

It  isn't  the  men  who  know  how  to  make  money  out  of 
criminals  who  are  most  discouraging.  It  is  the  personally  kind 
and  incorruptible  fellows  who  haven't  the  least  idea  how  to  go 
to  work  to  make  men. 

Nor  were  those  men  in  my  church  whom  I  thought  most 
discouraging  at  the  time  the  men  who  were  really  so.  Those 
who  helped  me  most  kept  me  blind  a  little  longer  than  those 
whose  help  was  refused.  If  they  had  all  refused  I  would  have 
waked  up  a  good  deal  sooner  than  I  did. 

Instead  of  this  some  of  them  helped  me  into  a  kind  of  serv- 
ice which  tended  to  satisfy  me  at  the  time. 

These  were  real  estate  men  in  the  main — I  suppose  be- 
cause that  was  the  one  business  in  Seattle  just  then  which  gave 
largest  opportunity  to  the  aggressive  and  adventurous  spirit — 
who  got  hold  of  a  vacant  lot  and  put  a  tent  upon  it,  and  started 
a  kind  of  midnight  mission  right  down  among  the  saloons. 
There  I  went  and  preached  between  Sundays,  and  tried  my  first 
tussle  with  wickedness  in  the  raw. 

Just  how  many  people  we  helped  I  do  not  know.  We 
thought  we  were  doing  good,  the  more  so  that  we  felt  a  kind 
of  tonic  reaction  upon  ourselves.  Yet  there  are  no  people  who 
need  to  be  on  their  guard  against  their  own  goodness  more  than 
the  people  who  work  in  the  slums.  It  is  such  an  easy  way  of 
"slurring  your  words"  in  a  moral  way. 

One  of  our  chief  helpers,  for  example,  was  a  man  who 
had  been  selling  peanuts  and  cheap  confections  the  morning  of 
the  great  fire.  Before  he  went  to  sleep  that  night  he  had  lost 
all  that  he  had,  and  more.  The  next  morning  he  borrowed 
$10.  called  on  one  of  the  chief  business  men  of  the  town,  rented 
a  prominent  corner  where  the  ashes  were  still  warm,  and  with- 
out disturbing  the  ashes  himself,  had  sublet  the  place  inside  of 
twenty-four  hours,  so  that  he  had  a  clear  gain  of  $100  a 
month. 


To  him  this  was  a  special  manifestation  of  the  grace  of 
God.  And  he  sang  about  Jesus,  and  talked  about  Jesus,  with 
the  more  gusto  every  time  he  doubled  the  deal.  If  some  of  us 
thought  of  such  transactions  less  in  terms  of  special  providence, 
and  preferred  to  talk  of  them  as  simply  good  business,  we  were 
as  innocent  as  he  of  the  actual  moral  values  involved.  We 
rebuked  the  gamblers  with  never  a  thought  that  our  own  rent 
money  was  taken  out  of  the  winning  of  other  men's  toil,  and 
we  did  not  suspect  that  it  was  this  kind  of  playing  with  prop- 
erty which  had  made  .the  rent  rate  of  the  neighboring  snacks 
so  high  that  no  one  but  a  woman  of  the  town  could  afford  to 
pay  the  price. 

We  were  swabbing  the  slums  with  one  hand  and  kicking 
open  the  sluiceways  of  immorality  with  both  feet.  And  while 
we  were  on  our  knees  crying1  aloud  over  some  half-sober  pen- 
itent, "Oh,  Lord,  help  us  to  save  this  poor  soul,"  we  were  creat- 
ing" conditions  for  our  own  material  comfort  which  would 
damn  a  dozen  for  every  man  saved. 

I  am  not  so  sure  that  the  frivolous  girls  of  whom  Mr. 
Moody  spoke  so  sharply  were  more  foolish  than  ourselves.  They 
were  shallow,  but  so  were  we.  They  were  not  so  willing  to  go 
to  hell  as  he  impatiently  indicated ;  they  were  only  slow  about 
deciding  to  follow  his  way  out. 

We  talked  about  Jesus,  and  sang  about  Jesus,  and  had  a 
good  time  in  the  persuasion  that  we  were  really  doing  a  good 
deal  for  Jesus.  Hut  if  the  Man  of  Xazarcth  had  actually  wan- 
dered into  that  tent,  and  had  put  into  blunt  Northfield  English 
the  sort  of  thing  that  He  taught  in  Galilee  some  centuries  since, 
we  might  have  done  worse  than  the  girls  who  giggled  at  a 
theology  which  they  did  not  understand.  We  might  have 
pulled  down  the  red  curtain  of  our  shame  against  him.  with 
the  tawdry  fineries  and  all  the  pathetic  price  of  our  surrender 
to  "the  world  and  the  flesh  inside. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  QUEST  FOR  THE  REAL  QUESTION. 

\\hilc  I  \vas  acting-  as  student  supply  for  Xcw  England 
pulpits  here  and  there,  before  1  1*:gan  my  regular  ministry,  1 
had  n:ct  a  young  lawyer  who  was  yet  in  the  early  stages  of  his 
professional  career,  lie  was  already  an -avowed  cynic,  and  a 
little  proud  of  the  fact,  I  think.  His  conversation  was  cour- 
teous, albeit  somewhat  condescending. 

In  an  impersonal  way,  he  made  it  clear  that  he  had  no 
faith  in  general  in  ministers,  church  members,  creeds  or  re- 
ligion. 

"A  lawyer  sees  too  much  of  the  seamy  side  -:i  life  to  have 
much  confidence  in  anybody,"  was  the  substance  of  his  testi- 
mony. f  ,  ; 

I  made  some  allowance  for  his  youth  then,  although  he 
was  (Her  Hi  an  mvself.  T  would  make  a  good  deal  more  allow- 
ance for  the  sophomoric  stage  of  his  experience  now.  Most 
'•nics  are  sophomores  who  have  petrified.  Men  who  rcnllv 
growr  up  grow  into  a  broader  charitv  toward  their  fellows  as  tl1^ 
years  increase,  and  not  into  less  believing  moods.  Cynicism  is 
callovvness  chilled  before  it  has  had  a  chance  to  flow  into  nor- 
mal channels  of  human  sympathy. 

But  there  are  serious  men  who  are  not  cynical  who,  never- 
theless, feel  that  lawv^^  and  doctors,  and  business  men  gener- 
ally, through  a  more  intimate  contact  with  men,  and  especially 
the  frailties  and  foibles  of  the  every-dav  side  of  life,  have  a  bct- 
'«•••-  chance  to  see  things  soberly  than  does  the  minister.  wh^>  :- 
supposed  to  deal  with  men  and  women  in  their  more  exalted 
and  less  normal  moods. 

"Ministers  don't  know  men,  and  therefore  they  judge  un- 
rcallv,"  is  the  way  many  would  put  it  if  they  stated  it  in  a  few 
words. 

This  impression  is  heightened  by  the  freedom  of  many 
ministers  from  the  ''small  vices"  which  are  common  to  men. 

One  ^f  the  famous  resorts  of  North  Lancashire,  in  Eng- 
hnd,  i^  CronVshaw's.  at  Burnley.  My  father  used  to  stop 
ihere  for  refreshments  when  he  was  a  cotton  manufacturer, 
about  the  time  I  was  born.  One  of  the  men  he  met  there  was 
lohn  Lord,  of  whom  I  have  heard  him  speak  so  often  that  I 
had  the  feeling  of  knowing  him,  though  I  was  but  six  years 


19- 

old  when  we  came  away.  Two  years  ago,  when  I  visited  Eng- 
land after  an  absence  of  forty-two  years,  I  dropped  in  at  Cronk- 
shaw's  with  my  nephew,  a  Burnley  business  man.  Whom 
should  we  meet  there  but  Mr.  William  Lord,  son  of  John  Lord, 
and  "agent"  of  the  Liberal  party  for  that  section  of  Lancashire. 
Politics  are  handled  there  more  on  lines  of  first-class  business 
than  here. 

William  Lord  was  cordiality  itself.  I  had  declined  with 
smiling  good  nature  liquors  and  tobacco,  and  the  everlasting 
English  tea,  and  Mr.  Lord,  with  some  wonder  apparent  in  his 
face,  offered  me  coffee.  When  I  confessed  that  1  had  never 
taken  a  cup  of  coffee  in  my  life,  his  surprise  broke  into  speech. 
With  broad  good  nature,  and  not  the  least  touch  of  that  easy 
superciliousness  with  which  we  too  often  mark  the  dogmatism 
of  our  tastes,  he  inquired  quietly: 

"What  do  you  confess  when  you  say  your  prayer;-:'' 

Now  I  have  told  lx>th  these  stories  for  the  sake  <•£  making 
clearer  yet  the  point  of  view  from  which  I  am  making  this  study 
of  a  minister's  life.  If  any  have  come  to  the  reading  of  tlic>e 
articles  with  the  notion  that  1  was  going  to  give  them  the 
"seamy  side"  of  churches  and  ministers  and  religious  \\orkj 
they  must  have  discovered  already  that  I  have  nothing  of  the 
sort  in  mind.  That  is  altogether  too  easy  a  task,  and  there  is 
already  quite  too  much  of  common  appetite  for  it. 

The  idea  that  ministers  do  not  know  the  side  of  life  which 
makes  for  pessimism  and  for  cynicism  is  a  mistake.  I  have  as- 
sociated much  with  both  doctors  and  lawyers,  atid  I  do  not  be- 
lieve that  either  class  knows  more  of  human  imperfection  an  : 
inconsistency  than  do  faithful  priests  and  ministers.  And  it  , 
a  very  superficial  judgment  of  life,  although  it  will  do  for  a 
I>ersonal  pleasantry,  that  because  a  man  has  none  of  the 
vices  he  has  therefore  nothing  in  particular  to  confess. 
struggle  for  a  real  man  is  a  good  deal  more  than  broiling  away 
flies. 

My  purpose  here  is  neither  to  confess  my  tr.vn  peccadilloes, 
nor  the  peccadilloes  of  other  preachers.  It  is  not  to  uncover 
the  inside  mechanics  of  the  ministry,  nor  to  bare  the  confidential 
conferences  of  the  churches.  I  am  not  going  to  regale  my 
readers  with  j  record  of  the  scandals  which  I  have  knov.n.  I 
could  do  it,  of  course.  When  I  was  alxuit  to  become  missio- 
nary superintendent  for  Northern  and  Central  California,  one 
of  my  fellow-ministers,  who  had  traveled  much  among  the 
churches,  said  to  me  very  earnestly: 

"Don't  take  the  jx>sition,  Whitaker.  If  you  have  to  get 
on  the  inside  of  all  the  troubles  in  the  churches  it  will  .spoil 


20. 

all  the  religion  you  have." 

People  who  talk  to  preachers  about  the  hypocrisies  in  the 
churches  too  often  forget  that  the  preachers  know  more  about 
that  sort  of  thing  already  than  an  outsider  can  possibly  know. 
Their  faith  has  had  to  overcome  such  knowledge  in  order  to 
live. 

It  is  looking  this  in  the  face  which  accounts  for  the  queer 
twists  which  a  great  many  ministers  get  in  their  theology.  That 
is  why  so  many  of  them  believe  that  the  world  is  coming  to  an 
end  soon,  because  the  only  way  they  can  keep  their  optimism 
is  through  some  program  of  starting  all  over  again.  That  ac- 
counts for  most  of  the  devil-doctrine  so  far  as  it  still  survives 
among  us  moderns;  only  so  can  some  good  people  account  for 
the  vast  perversity  of  the  human  race.  It  is  because  they  see 
the  seamy  side  of  life  so  plainly  that  the  majority  of  evangel- 
ical believers  still  hold  that  the  natural  man  is  absolutely  lost, 
and  that  those  who  are  saved  are  saved  by  the  unmerited  grace 
of  God. 

The  churches  do  not  pose  as  storage  houses  of  perfection. 
They  admit  the  badness  in  human  nature,  admit  it  not  too  little 
but  too  much. 

I  did  not  lose  my  religion  by  going  among  the  churches, 
although  I  saw  a  lot  that  was  morally  unsightly.  I  have  long 
since  gotten  past  all  this  cheap  talk  about  hypocrisies,  either  in 
or  out  of  the  churches.  Hypocrisy  means  something  -more  to 
me  now  than  the  conscious  and  outward  inconsistencies  of  men. 

The  most  dangerous  hypocrisy  is  not  humbugging  others; 
it  is  humbugging  yourself. 

It  is  not  playing  a  part  consciously;  it  is  playing  it  uncoil 
sciously. 

It  is  not  falling  over  your  faults;  it  is  falling  over  your 
virtues. 

If  I  do  not  make  you  understand  that  I  have  written  these 
articles  for  you  in  vain. 

That  is  why  I  have  admitted  frankly  the  average  goodness 
of  the  ministry.  That  is  why  I  have  recognized  out  of  my  own 
experience  the  high  motives  which  usually  actuate  the  mission- 
ary. That  is  why  I  have  already  touched  upon  the  honest  en- 
thusiasm of  the  slum  worker.  And  it  is  why  in  every  case  I 
have  hinted,  although  I  have  only  hinted  yet,  at  the  insuffi- 
ciency of  this  goodness  in  relation  to  them  all — minister,  mis- 
sionary, slum  worker.  Insufficiency  is  not  a  strong  enough 
word.  The  most  serious  fault  of  our  goodness'  is  not  that  there 
is  merely  an  insufficiency  of  it.  It  is  rather  that  our  light  itself 
so  often  becomes  a  darkness  which  leads  us  astray. 


You  can  do  something  with  the  boy  in  school  who  knows 
he  is  backward,  whose  blunders  are  the  butt  of  his  mates  an  1 
the  burden  of  his  memories.  It  is  the  boy  who  is  the  admired 
of  all,  and  who  Jhinks  himself  that  he  has  arrived,  who  is  the 
real  problem. 

"Seest  tliou  a  man  wise  in  his  own  conceit?  There  is  more 
hope  of  a  fool  than  of  him." 

It  is  not  the  obvious  low  living  in  the  churches  which  is 
their  most  serious  impediment :  it  is  their  unconsciousness  of 
the  low  •  quality  of  their  high  living.  It  was  not  the  sinners 
who  turned  me  from  conventional  orthodoxy;  it  was  the  saints. 

I  Setter  people  than  myself,  by  far,  with  whom  I  have  been 
on  terms  of  the  utmost  intimacy,  were  unwittingly  my 
teachers  in  bringing  me  to  the  most  radical  conclusions  to  which 
I  have  come  as  to  the  essential  moral  oneness  of  all  men,  and 
the  menace  of  most  of  what  we  call  morality  to  the  actual  moral 
health  of  the  world. 

As  long  as  I  associated  with  ignorant  people  I  thought 
school  and  college  meant  the  perfection  of  knowledge.  It  was 
the  intimacy  of  my  contact  with  school  and  college  in  after 
years  which  showed  me  that  there  is  nothing  quite  so  ignorant 
as  our  wisdom,  after  all. 

In  the  next  two  or  three  papers  I  am  going  to  show  the 
actual  goodness  of  the  church  at  work.  These  arc  genuine  pic- 
tures, taken  from  actual  life  experiences,  and  they  are  shown 
with  genuine  appreciation  for  just  what  they  are.  I  shall  follow 
them  with  the  story  of  my  contact  with  evil,  through  the  city 
officials,  through  my  work  as  chaplain  in  the  Oregon  peniten- 
tiary, and  through  similar  service,  all  of  a  volunteer  character 
and  without  official  appointment  or  pay.  in  the  Oregon  St'iti* 
Asvlum  for  the  Insane  and  the  Oregon  Legislature.  And  then 
I  shall  tell  how  through  my  California  experience  I  came  to  siv 
the  past  more  clearly,  and  to  judge  the  present  as  I  judge  it 
today. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

SPIRITUAL  HIGH  LIGHTS. 

It  was  the  Sunday  after  Thanksgiving,  the  second  Thanks- 
giving which  I  had  spent  in  Seattle.  The  morning  service  was 
done,  and  the  evening  sermon  was  prepared.  I  intended  to 
speak  that  night  along  lines  of  every-day  living  on  the  story  of 
the  "Good  Samaritan,"  and  in  particular  on  the  words  with 
which  Jesus  concluded  that  immortal  illustration  of  practical 
neighborliness.  "Go  thou  and  do  likewise." 

My  wife  and  I  went  down  to  the  young  people's  meeting, 
as  we  commonly  did  on  Sunday  evenings.  The  room  was  filled, 
the  singing  was  enthusiastic,  the  testimonies  were  good.  This 
was  in  the  earl)'  days  of  the  Christian  Endeavor  movement, 
when  the  work  'was,  from  the  devotional  point  of  view,  at  its 
best. 

All  through  my  ministry  I  have  kept  the  habit  of  regular 
study.  A  minister  is  his  own  boss.  There  is  no  boss  for  whom 
it  is  more  difficult  to  work  than  for  yourself,  unless  you  hold 
yourself  very  firmly  in  hand.  Perhaps  my  factory  experience 
made  me  more  jealous  of  holding  myself  to  regular  hours  in 
the  ministry,  or  possibly  I  owe  it  even  more  to  the  iteration  of 
its  importance,  and  the  reiteration  of  it,  by  one  of  the  professors 
in  the  theological  seminary.  However  that  may  be,  I  have  held 
my  hours  pretty  regularly,  and  my  sermons  have  seldom  known 
Saturday  night  preparation.  Usually  by  Saturday  morning  they 
have  been  readv  for  the  last  touches  of  Sundav  finishing.  Inci- 
dentally I  ought  to  say  that,  since  my  first  dozen  sermons  were 
preached,  I  have  never  taken  a  note  into  the  pulpit,  but  have 
trusted  to  the  preparation  of  logical  thought  and  arrangement 
and  the  verbal  inspiration  of  the  hour. 

I  had  my  sermon  comfortably  ready  that  night  before  I 
entered  the  Christian  Endeavor  meeting,  even  to  the  last  mental 
reviewing  of  it  an  hour  or  two  before.  The  meeting  was  hard- 
Iv  under  way  before  I  felt  a  deep  dissatisfaction  with  it.  One  of 
the  songs  was  a  favorite  of  other  days,  less  used  in  the  churches 
now,  "Almost  Persuaded."  The  singing  was  hardly  under  way 
when  I  felt  a  strong  impression  to  preach  upon  the  text  at  the 
basis  of  the  song,  taking  it,  of  course,  in  its  old-time  accepted 
reading,  which  is  almost  certainly  an  incorrect  rendering  of 
Paul.  I  refused  the  suggestion  instantly.  My  pride  of  intellect- 
ual procedure  in  those  early  days  of  my  ministry  was  such  that 
I  had  little  use  for  "mere  impressions." 


23. 

"I  have  made  careful  and  reasonable  preparation  for  what 
I  am  going  to  say  tonight,"  I  argued  with  myself,  "and  I  am 
not  going  to  run  after  any  momentary  impulses." 

Nevertheless  the  impression  persisted  and  prevailed.  An 
outline  of  thought  unrolled  itself  before  me  as  si>ontaneoiisly 
as  the  text  had  come  to  me,  and  in  spite  of  the  interruptions  of  at- 
tention consequent  upon  the  course  of  the  meeting,  with  its  many 
human  elements,  I  found  myself  in  the  pulpit  a  little  later  with 
my  previously  prepared  sermon  impossible  to  me,  and  with 
this  message  so  to  the  front  of  my  thinking  and  feeling  that  I 
could  not  refuse  it.  I  preached  as  I  had  been  impressed  to 
preach,  with  freedom  and  power. 

Before  the  service  was  done,  a  second  impulse  came  crowd- 
ing into  my  mind,  to  be  resisted  and  to  conquer  as  before.  This 
time  the  impulse  was  to  hold  an  "inquiry  meeting"  in  the  rear 
room  as  soon  as  the  benediction  was  said.  Such  after-meetings 
were  not  common  with  me  then,  nor  with  that  church.  The 
rear  room  was  not  convenient.  Those  who  stayed  would  have 
to  pass  the  pulpit,  and  go  up  certain  steps,  instead  of  doing  the 
much  easier  and  more  natural  thing,  which  would  be  to  follow 
the  crowd  and  go  out.  It  seemed  likely  that  none  would  stay 
except  those  who  were  already  fully  persuaded  of  the  things 
which  I  preached. 

But  I  followed  the  impulse  again.  The  rear  room  was  well 
filled. 

One  man  was  there  for  whom  the  sermon  and  the  after- 
meeting  marked  a  crisis  that  night.  He  had  been  there  in  the 
morning,  and  it  is  possible  that  my  knowledge  of  the  fact,  and 
my  sensibility  to  his  situation  and  moods,  had  something  to  do 
with  both  of  the  impulses  which  I  have  described.  I  am  not 
concerned  to  postulate  any  supernatural  origin  for  them. 
Neither  am  I  anxious,  as  I  might  have  been  once  on  a  time,  to 
explain  them  in  what  we  call  "purely  natural"  ways.  The  no- 
tion that  you  can  explain  everything  can  be  worked  altogether 
too  hard.  Supernaturalists  are  very  superstitious — indeed,  only 
a  little  less  superstitious  than  materialists.  I  am  just  telling 
you  what  happened,  and  how  some  of  us  felt  about  it  that  night. 
Perhaps  it  will  help  you  to  understand  why  the  goodness  of  the 
churches  satisfies  some  people  who  ought  not  to  be  so  easily 
satisfied. 

The  man  was  a  drunkard.  I  had  never  seen  him  in  the 
gutter,  and  I  do  not  know  that  he  had  ever  been  there.  But  he 
was  an  alcoholic,  to  use  a  more  exact  and  scientific  term  than 
drunkard,  which,  I  take  it,  means  very  much  the  same  thing. 
He  was  poor,  his  family  were  poor,  and  his  grit  was  gone  the 


24. 

way  of  the  bottle. 

His  wife  was  a  member  of  the  church,  a  dev<  ut  patient 
woman.  She  had  wanted  me  to  meet  him.  lit  was  shy  of 
preachers.  I  had  shaken  hands  with  him,  but  had  avoided  any 
religious  talk.  I  had  no  special  reason  to  think  he  would  be 
there  that  night. 

He  was  not  only  there,  but  he  was  "clothed  and  in  his  right 
mind."  He  stood  up  in  the  after-meeting  and  took  a  decided 
stand  for  the  better  life.  I  have  not  seen  him  or  heard  of  him 
these  many  years,  but  the  last  I  knew  of  him  he  was  a  sober 
and  sincerely  religious  man. 

Now  these  facts  came  out  afterward. 

My  wife,  a  very  matter-of-fact  woman,  not  pious  but 
simply  and  naturally,  devout,  had  been  burdened  for  him  men- 
tally all  afternoon.  The  impression  of  his  need  had  been  pe- 
culiarly emphatic  with  her.  Spiritual  experiences  were  for  her 
very  hard  to  talk  about.  She  had  a  deep!  reverent  reticence 
which  piosity  never  has.  She  did  not  even  mention  her  mood 
to  me.  But  inwardly  she  was  much  in  prayer  for  the  man  all 
the  afternoon. 

In  my  wife's  Sunday  School  class  was  a  young  woman 
whom  I  had  seen  born  again.  Her's  was  the  only  spiritual  birth 
which  I  ever  actually  saw.  I  am  not  attempting  here  to  define 
what  the  spiritual  birth  is.  Let  that  go,  and  call  it  by  any  other 
name  which  you  please.  This  I  know,  she  sat  before  me  one 
day,  and  I  made  the  way  of  the  divine  life  as  plain  to  her  as 
I  could.  She  was  of  the  strong,  vigorous  type,  big  in  body, 
quick  in  mind,  a  really  handsome  woman  in  her  best  days,  with 
the  promise  of  her  mature  strength  and  beauty  already  upon 
her.  She  was,  as  Holland  puts  it,  in  Kathrina,  no  weakling. 
"But  a  round  woman,  who  with  insight  keen 
Had  measured  well  her  womanhood." 

I  saw  the  hesitation  linger  in  her  eyes  in  spite  of  all  my 
explanations — the  absolute  sincerity  of  her  soul  as  she  refused 
to  assent  where  her  conviction  was  not  clear.  Then  as  I 
paused,  and  we  were  silent  together  for  a  moment,  I  saw  the 
sudden  illumination  of  understanding  flash  into  her  eyes.  She 
was  another  woman  from  that  hour. 

Now,  she  also,  unknown  to  me,  and  unknown  to  my  wife, 
had  been  burdened  all  that  day  for  this  man.  She  had  only  a 
casual  acquaintance  with  the  family,  T  am  sure,  and  there  were 
no  special  natural  attachments  which  drew  her  to  them.  Hut 
while  I  was  going  over  in  review  that  afternoon  the  sermon 
which  I  did  not  preach  that  night,  and  while  my  wife  was  in- 
wardly invoking  the  guidance  of  the  Spirit  for  the  man's  de- 


25. 

liverance  from  the  devil  of  drink  and  all  the  down-pull  of  the 
meaner  man,  she  also  was  praying,  without  any  outward  con- 
tact with  us,  or  knowledge  of  the  fellowship  of  anybody  with 
her  mood. 

Her  prayinrr  was  practical.     As  he  rose  to  his  feet  after 

the  benediction  in  the  main  meeting,  and  hesitated  whether  to 

go  toward  the  rear  room,  his  wife  not  daring  to  speak  to  him 

lest  she  rouse  a  contrary  mood,  this  young  girl  had  stepped  to 

his  side  and  in  the  simplest  fashion  possible  asked  htm  to  stay 

a  little  longer  and  attend  the  other  meeting  as  well.  Her  cordial 

implicity  turned   his   steps   toward  the   room   where   he  chose 

Iccisively  the  man's  part. 

I  have  not  told  this  story  to  impose  any  explanation  of  it 
upon  you.  Take  it  as  supernaturally  or  naturally  as  you  please. 
I  have  told  the  experience  to  help  you  understand  the  churches 
at  their  best,  and  why  it  is  that  so  many  people  are  sat- 
isfied with  them.  They  ought  not  to  be,  as  I  am  going  to 
try  to  show.  Their  best  blinds  them  to  a  better.  1  believe.  Rut 
you  cannot  understand  them  if  you  will  not  enter  into  their 
best  and  try  to  see  it  from  their  point  of  view.  How  can  you 
hc1»)  them  to  see  that  their  good  is  hindering  them  if  you  will 
not  admit  that  it  is  good  at  all?  You  cannot  even  help  a 
child  so. 

"Ah.  but  that  was  fine,  only  I  saw  a  finer  behind  it  which 
T  'MIT  afraid  yon  are  not  going  to  bring  out  because  your  good 
is  jn«t  good  enough  to  satisfy  you  as  it  is,"  said  a  music  teacher 
who  hid  just  listened  to  the  best  work  of  his  pupil.  "You  do 
so  vrll  T  am  afr-^'r  von  will  never  do  better."  And  there  were 
nlmost  tears  in  his  eyes. 

x  nd  you  who  have  only  beratings  for  the  churches,  you 
will  never  help  them  to  the  mightier  music  which  thev  ought 
to  produce  till  you  are  able  to  listen  sympathetically  and  intelli- 
gent Iv  to  the  strongest  and  sweetest  strains  which  they  are  sing- 
in  <r  now. 


• 


CHAPTER  VII. 

COMFORTABLE  GOODNESS. 

One  cannot  understand  the  churches,  and  the  contentment 
which  many  good  people  have  in  them,  without  taking  into  ac- 
count such  mystic  experiences  as  that  which  I  have  just  told. 
One  such  experience  is  enough  to  hold  many  a  man  through 
a  hundred  disagreeable  dealings  with  the  inconsistencies  of  his 
fellows.  There  may  be  gaps  in  a  man's  creed  which  his  think- 
ing cannot  bridge,  but  when  it  works  miracles  for  him  he  will 
stand  for  a  lot  of  lapses  between.  It  isn't  faith  in  the  miracles 
of  yesterday  which  keeps  any  of  the  churches  going;  it  is  the 
fact  that  something  of  the  seemingly  miraculous  anyway  is 
part  of  the  experience  of  all  of  them  today. 

I  could  duplicate  this  relation  with  many  another  quite  as 
remarkable,  as  I  presume  every  minister  could. 

When  B.  Fay  Mills  preached  his  first  sermon  at  Salem 
during  my  ministry  there  he  spoke  on  the  reported  saying  of 
Jesus  at  the  grave  of  Lazarus,  "Roll  ye  away  the  stone."  There 
was  no  discussion  of  miracles  in  it,  and  it  was,  like  most  of  his 
preaching,  quite  unimpassioned  in  form.  But  I  knew  of  one 
miracle  which  came  out  of  it. 

Two  women  had  been  enemies  for  years,  so  that  they  had 
not  spoken,,  although  thev  moved  of  necessity  more  or  less  in 
the  same  social  circles.  The  one  whom  I  knew  best  was  one  of 
the  proudest  women  whom  I  have  ever  known,  of  social  promi- 
nence, and  not  of  ordinarily  devout  mood.  No  one  said  a  word 
to  her  in  a  religious  way  that  afternoon,  and  no  one  had  the 
slightest  suspicion  of  what  it  was  in  her  heart  to  do.  Yet 
after  a  brief,  bitter  struggle  with  her  own  heart,  she  did  the 
apparently  impossible  thing,  incredible  to  those  who  knew  her 
best.  She  put  her  pride  under  her  feet  and  walked  deliberately 
over  to  the  other  woman's  house,  which  was  some  distance 
away,  and  went  in  and  asked  to  be  forgiven,  though  she  would 
have  been  killed  rather  than  do  it  the  (lay  before. 

« I  laid  mv  hand  on  a  young  man's  shoulder  one  night  in 
that  same  series  of  meetings  and  said  simply,  "I  wish  you  were 
a  Christian."  That  was  absolutely  all  that  T  said.  I  have  called 
him  a  young  man,  but  he  was  thirty-five,  I  suppose,  and  he  had 
not  been  a  church-going  man  at  all.  He  came  into  the  church 
afterward,  only  a  few  days  later,  and  confessed  that  the  touch 
of  my  hand  and  that  one  friendly  wish  had  revolutionized  his 
way  of  looking  at  life. 


27. 

But  I  will  not  dwell  upon  these  things  because  there  is  an- 
other side  to  the  attractiveness  of  ordinary  church  life,  and  the 
contentment  of  many  with  respectable  goodness  or  religious- 
ness, wThich  needs  to  be  taken  into  account.  It  is  not  miracles 
which  keep  most  people  in  the  churches  who  continue  there,  or 
the  appearance  of  miracles,  if  you  like  that  way  of  putting  it 
better.  It  is  rather  the  comfortableness,  the  home-i-ness,  to 
use  a  word  which  isn't  in  the  dictionary  and  ought  to  be — one 
might  almost  say  the  "coziness"  of  the  fellowship  which  one 
finds  there. 

There  is  a  comfortableness  in  being  respectable,  and  in  the 
associations  of  respectable  people,  which  keeps  many  a  man 
from  daring  the  discomfort  of  being  a  better  man. 

I  did  not  want  to  go  to  Salem.  There  were  two  reasons 
for  this,  the  first  that  I  wanted  much  more  to  go  to  California 
when  I  turned  away  from  Puget  Sound.  The  second  reason 
was  that  at  the  time  the  Salem  church  did  not  have  a  good  rep- 
utation for  unity.  There  had  been  some  sharp  divisions  of 
counsel  between  the  young  people  and  the  older  people  about 
keeping  the  previous  pastor. 

"Don't  go,"  said  one  of  my  ministerial  friends  to  me  when 
Salem  was  mentioned.  "I  wouldn't  touch  that  church  with  a 
forty- foot  pole." 

What  the  world  says  about  the  churches  is  nothing  to 
what  ministers  sometimes  say  among  themselves. 

Nevertheless  I  went,  under  circumstances  which  if  detailed 
here  would  seem  to  some  more  miraculous,  and  to  others  more 
absurdly  mystical  in  that  interpretation  of  them,  than  any  story 
which  I  have  yet  told.  A  call  that  was  unanimous,  where 
unanimity  had  seemed  out  of  the  question  a  litt/e  while  before; 
an  acceptance  that  was  written  and  never  sent,  but  replaced 
before  |>osting  by  a  refusal ;  a  snowstorm  that  lengthened  the 
announcement  of  "twenty  minutes  for  refreshments"  at  Ash- 
land, when  we  were  almost  over  the  line  into  California,  into 
an  actual  stay  of  thirteen  days  at  that  point,  and  a  very  reluct- 
ant return  over  the  road  which  was  washed  awav  immediately 
behind  us ;  a  flood  that  turned  all  central  Oregon  into  an  inland 
sea:  days  of  indecision  in  which  we  were  marooned  between 
Salem  and  Portland,  ending  in  another  visit  to  Salem,  another 
call,  and  an  acceptance  this  time  which  T  felt  no  desire  to  with- 
draw, these  are  the  bare  outlines  of  an  experience  that  gave  me 
sympathetic  understanding  of  how  some  jx-ople  can  lie  quite 
persuaded  of  the  doctrine  of  special  providence.  T  hardly  think 
that  the  floods  which  mado  the  first  weeks  of  18')0  so  memor- 
able in  Oregon  that  old  settlers  compared  conditions  with  the 


historic  high  waters  of  1861  were  actually  provided  to  keep  me 
out  of  California,  or  to  insure  my  settlement  in  the  "Webfoot 
State"  for  awhile,  although  that  was  one  of  the  minor  by-pro- 
ducts of  those  atmospherically  strenuous  days.  But  there  is  no 
doubt  that  the  sense  of  a  providential  leading  pervading  all  the 
phenomena  of  life  is  strong  in  the  churches  and  among  many 
good  people  outside  of  the  churches,  and  has  something  to  do 
with  their  contentment  with  things  as  they  are,  and  their  feel- 
ing of  being  in  good  standing  with  God. 

Altogether  my  ministry  in  Salem  was  the  most  broadly  hu- 
man ministry  I  have  known.  Never  have  I  had  a  more  united 
church  behind  me  than  I  had  from  first  to  last  of  my  residence 
there.  Never  have  I  known  a  more  kindly  or  sincerely  religious 
people  than  there.  I  think  of  Salem  yet  with  the  warmth  and 
with  something  of  the  heartache  with  which  one  remembers  a 
family  circle  that  has  ceased  to  be. 

If  material  matters  had  much  to  do  with  my  going  to  Salem 
they  had  also  much  to  do  with  the  prosperity  of  my  pastorate 
there.  Some  things  which  entered  into  my  success  were  so  or- 
dinary, so  insignificant  in  themselves,  and,  as  some  people  would 
say,  so  quite  apart  from  the  dignities  of  the  ministry,  that  it  is 
hard  to  tell  them  so  that  others  will  understand  how  much  more 
they  mean  than  the  mere  facts  on  the  surface  show.  But  I  see 
them  now  as  I  did  not  see  them  then  in  relation  to  the  larger 
failures  of  the  religious  life,  and  they  mean  more  to  me  than 
they  did  when  I  used  them  as  instruments  of  success  long  ago. 

One  of  the  first  calls  that  I  made  in  Salem  was  on  one  of 
my  deacons,  who  was  employed  very  long  hours  in  a  bakery.  I 
did  not  think  much  about  the  hours  of  his  employment  then. 
What  I  noticed  with  an  almost  childish  interest  was  that  he 
was  making  candy — molasses  peppermints — and  that  the  process 
was  so  simple  I  was  confident  I  could  do  it  myself.  I  did.  Either 
from  him,  or  someone  else,  about  the  same  time,  I  learned  how 
to  make  "fondant'' — that  is.  the  foundation  for  cream  candies 
of  many  kinds.  A  little  later,  calling  this  time  on  another  re- 
ligious friend  in  Portland  whose  conditions  of  labor  I  might 
have  considered  more,  I  obtained  the  secret  of  covering  creams 
with  chocolate,  and  went  home  and  worked  that  trick  of  the 
confectioner's  trade  also.  My  wife  and  I  were  not  expert  con- 
fectioners when  all  our  home  experimenting  was  done,  and  made 
no  pretense  to  be,  but  I  am  quite  safe  in  saying,  and  it  is  no 
mere  pun  either,  that  we  made  that  parsonage  while  we  were  in 
it  the  sweetest  spot  in  town  to  a  host  of  young  people,  and 
sweetened  religion  for  them  at  the  same  time. 

The  old  house,  with  its  moss-covered  roof  on  which  in  the 


29. 

springtime  fell  the  seedling"  cherries  from  two  wide-spreading 
trees,  said  to  be  of  missionary-pioneer  origin,  was  the  most 
picturesque  home  in  which  I  have  ever  lived.  The  door  from 
the  front  porch  opened  directly  into  the  living  room.  On  the 
opposite  side  of  the  room  was  a  fireplace  which  "drew"  per- 
fectly. Oak  logs  were  cheap  in  Salem  then,  and  their  smoke 
ascended  as  a  perpetual  incense  through  all  the  long  wet  winter 
months.  I  covered  the  fire  almost  as  carefully  as  a  Parsee  priest 
at  night,  and  uncovered  it  at  morning  after  the  manner  of  the 
fore-fathers  in  the  days  before  sulphur  matches  were  made.  4\nd 
always  in  the  evening  it  flared  its  welcome  to  all  who  opened 
our  outer  door. 

The  old  manse — literally  a  moss-covered  manse  it  was  in 
those  days — was  more  than  our  home ;  it  was  the  home  of  all 
our  people  as  well.  The  back  door  was  hardly  twenty  feet  from 
the  side  door  of  the  church  which  opened  into  the  north  wing 
where  our  devotional  meetings  and  social  meetings  were  held, 
and  where  our  women  folks  cooked  and  served  meals  every  now 
and  then  that  were  famed  all  over  town. 

Was  there  a  dish  to  borrow  ?  someone  stepped  across  to 
our  kitchen  door.  Was  there  anything  left  over?  It  went  the 
way  of  the  same  convenient  aperture.  Did  someone  faint  in 
church,  or  turn  sick?  They  were  led  or  carried  to  the  lounge 
which'  spread  its  inviting  length  beside  the  rear  window.  Every- 
body came  -and  went  there  much  as  they  pleased,  sometime.-* 
taking  possession  of  the  house  in  our  absence  and  doing  the 
cooking  or  the  candy-making  in  advance.  Yet  I  do  not  remem- 
ber that  we  ever  felt  this  intimacy  a  burden  to  us  then.  A 
nobler  group  of  young  people,  and  one  more  morally  in  earnest 
within  the  limitations  of  their  thought  I  have  never  known. 

This  is  not  primarily  a  personal  narrative,  and  I  am  not 
telling  these  particulars  quite  in  a  personal  way.  It  is  a  study 
of  goodness  as  1  have  seen  it  in  actual  contact  with  churches  and 
respectable  people,  and  as  I  have  come  to  see  it  inwardly  of 
late  years.  The  supreme  appeal  of  the  churches  still  is  prob- 
ably their  mysticism,  and  with  mysticism  T  have  a  good  deal  of 
sympathy  yet.  Mysticism  "has  its  limitations  and  its  dangers, 
but  they  are  not  more  marked  in  my  thinking,  and  I  hold  myself 
free  in  my  thinking,  than  are  the  limitations  and  the  dangers  of 
materialism.  Hut  if  the  supreme  appeal  of  the  churches  is  mys- 
ticism, the  sense  of  the  invisible  and  the  immeasurable  in  human 
life,  the  ordinary  appeal  of  the  churches  which  makes  them  per- 
sistently attractive  to  many  is  on  the  social  side.  The  minister 
who  can  create  most  of  the  home  atmosphere  in  his  church  and 
can  hold  the  largest  number  to  the  family  feeling  is  the  mini>- 


30. 

ter  of  our  day  who  commonly  wins. 

I  did  a  good  deal  of  hard  pulpit  work  at  Salem  and  was 
reckoned  a  popular  preacher  there.  \Ye  had  as  f  have  indicated 
strong  spiritual  experiences.  But  the  fireplace  and  the  open 
kitchen  door,  the  candy  hook  and  the  confabs  before  the  rirc,  the 
chit-chat  over  English  literature  and  the  dabblings  in  German 
and  other  studies  with  my  young  people  who  were  out  of  school, 
these  were  the  things  that  made  my  ministry  there  so  good  to 
us  and  to  many  more ;  these  were  the  things  which  made  many 
content  to  seek  no  farther  for  goodness  than  that  which  they  had 
found.  They  almost  contented  me.  If  t  had  seen  no  other  side 
of  life  at  Salem  I  might  have  been  quite  satisfied  with  the  snug 
Phariseeism  of  it.  It  was  some  uncomfortable  people  on  the 
outside  who  made  me  uncomfortable,  and  led  me  the  way  that 
showed  me  how  dangerou  a  matter  contentment  itself  may  be. 


CHAPTER  VIll. 

THE  MINISTRY  OF  THE  UNCOMFORTABLE. 

The  only  time  that  I  have  evef  suffered  violence  in  my 
ministry  was  during'  my  residence  in  Salem.  I  was  more  to 
blame  for  it  than  the  man  who  tried  to  do  me  harm. 

There  was  no  segregated  district  in  Salem  then,  so  far  as 
I  know,  but  the  red  shame  flaunted  itself  on  some  of  the  prin- 
cipal thoroughfares.  I  could  not  pass  from  the  parsonage 
straight  down  Liberty  street  to  the  main  thoroughfare,  along 
which  the  street  cars  went  to  Wil!::mette  University  and  the 
station,  without  seeing  the  symbols  of  Y.iis  indecency  on  a  house 
front  which  belonged  to  one  of  the  city*  officials.  Or.  if  the 
symbols  were  withheld  it  was  common  knowledge  that  t'.ic  moral 
leprosy  itself  was  there. 

One  Sunday  night  I  said  my  say  about  it,  in  stinging  words. 
Knowing  the  ordinary  imperviousness  of  the  politicians  to  pul- 
pit pronouncements,  I  went  out  of  my  way  to  make  the  whip- 
lash of  my  word  cut  to  the  quick.  I  was  young,  and  I  did  not 
realize  then  the  unfairness  of  personalities  in  the  pulpit,  where 
the  preacher  has  every  advantage  and  the  other  man  has  no 
chance  to  hit  back.  My  remarks  were  especially  in  bad  taste. 
as  I  see  it  now,  that  I  made  the  man's  appearance  the  instru- 
ment of  my  indignation  against  him  for  his  social  offenses.  It 
was  this,  as  the  event  proved,  which  hurt. 

A  day  or  two  afterward  I  had  a  polite  note  from  him,  ask 
ing  me  to  call  at  the  store  where  he  worked  and  talk  the  matte. 
over  with  him. 

I  had  no  suspicion  that  any  violence  was  intended,  a»-;l  I 
have  my  doubts  now  whether  he  had  anything  of  the  kh.  1  in 
mind  when  he  wrote.  I  would  probably  have  gone  in  any  case, 
though  I  might  have  been  more  on  my  guard. 

It  was  a  general  merchandise  store  and  he  received  me  in 
the  office.  I  le  stated  his  complaint  against  me  quietly,  and  we 
talked  about  it  and  alxmt  his  ownership  of  the  misused  p'rop- 
erty  without  any  harsh  words.  He  was  sullenly  evasive  on  his 
part,  and  I  did  not  feel  then  that  I  could  budge  in  the  direction 
of  softening  what  I  had  said. 

AJ?  we  walked  down  the  long  store  together  suddenly  he 
sprang  upon  me  and  began  to  pummel  my  head  with  his  fists. 
I  had  no  time  to  put  myself  in  an  attitude  of  defense,  lloides 
I  had  never  been  a  fighter,  except  for  the  "rassling"  squabbles 
of  my  youth  which  were  not  of  a  very  serious  sort.  1  was 


32. 

mightily  interested  in  militarism  as  a  boy,  but  pugilism  never 
appealed  to  me  at  all. 

I  suppose  now  that  the  object  of  my  assailant  was  to  get 
even  with  me  for  what  I  had  said  about  his  face  by  spoiling  the 
looks  of  my  own.  He  was  not  quite  quick  enough,  however, 
and,  sudden  as  the  assault  was,  I  was  able  to  fend  off  his  blows 
with  my  arms  so  that  he  landed  only  one  or  two  hard  knocks  on 
the  top  of  my  head,  which  did  not  even  knock  me  down.  One 
fair-sized  bump  I  remember  he  left  as  a  souvenir  of  the  melee 
for  a  few  days.  Before  he  could  do  further  damage  the  men  in 
the  store  seized  him,  and  I  passed  out  into  the  street. 

Among  my  friends  there  was,  of  course,  swift,  hot  talk  of 
violence  in  return.  But  the  mob  mood  was  not  according  to  my 
mind,  and  I  promptly  put  a  quietus  on  all  such  talk.  The  at- 
tack injured  the  opposition  more  than  it  hurt  my  standing  in  the 
town,  and  since  I  had  made  no  attempt  to  strike  back  there  were 
some  who  were  inclined  to  give  me  more  credit  for  the  forbear- 
ance than  I  deserved. 

If  there  was  any  merit  on  my  part,  it  was  that  after  the  first 
excitement  of  the  experience  was  over  I  conscientiously  put 
away  from  my  mind  all  resentment  toward  the  man.  I  think 
I  was  more  to  blame  than  he,  so  far  as  the  attack  is  concerned, 
as  I  have  already  indicated.  But  in  the  correcting  of  the  evil  I 
think  his  method  was  even  more  stupid  than  mine.  Violence  of 
words  is  bad  enough  as  a  curative  measure,  but  bodily  violence 
is  nearly  always  a  fool's  game. 

A  remark  made  by  one  of  my  best  members,  and  best 
friends,  about  that  time  did  me  a  great  deal  more  good  than  the 
blows  which  I  had  received.  The  remark  was  made  to  someone 
else,  and  was  passed  on  to  me. 

"Well,"  he  said,  in  his  dry  fashion,  "I  am  surprised  that  a 
man  who  has  as  much  sense  as  Brother  Whitaker  hasn't  got 
more." 

It  took  some  years  for  that  remark  to  soak  in. 

Another  Sunday  evening  in  Salem  I  said  some  very  plain 
things  about  the  illicit  liquor  selling  in  the  drug  stores  in  town. 
One  of  the  young  men  of  my  church,  from  one  of  the  foremost 
families,  was  the  proprietor  of  one  of  the  drug  stores.  He  was 
mad,  mad  clear  through,  when  he  heard,  with  additions  I  sup- 
pose, what  I  had  said. 

Xow  the  humorous  part  of  the  matter  was  that  until  he 
got  mad  about  it  I  had  no  idea  he  was  doing  it.  Of  course 
then  I  knew  he  was  guilty.  It  is  always  easy  to  get  mad  when 
you  are  wrong.  And  he  was  madder  at  himself,  although  he 
would  not  admit  it  then,  when  I  told  him  to  his  face  that  it  was 


33. 

his  own  anger  which  had  given  him  away. 

He  fairly  raged  at  me.  I  stood  it  with  reasonable  good 
nature  until  he  said: 

"You  don't  know  which  side  your  bread  is  buttered  on  or 
you'd  take  a  different  tack." 

Then  I  flared  up. 

"Look  here,"  I  answered,  calling  him  by  his 'first  name,  ''I 
want  you  to  understand  that  I'm  not  preaching  for  bread  and 
butter,  and  I  always  keep  enough  money  on  hand  to  pay  my 
fare  out  of  this  town  in  either  direction." 

Then  I  turned  on  my  heej  and  left  the  store. 

It  fs  to  his  credit  that  when  he  had  cooled  off  he  was  more 
friendly  with  me  than  before,  and  always  swore  by  me  from 
that  time.  Religion  never  got  much  hold  on  him.  He  was 
human,  very  human  as  I  learned  afterward.  Yet  I  found  the 
man  in  him,  I  think,  and.  finding  the  man  in  him,  one  of  the 
weakest  of  my  members,  helped  me  to  find  the  man  in  my- 
self. It  is  for  this  that  I  have  written  of  him  here,  because 
he  also  was  one  of  my  teachers  in  learning  the  new-old  ethic 
of  Jesus. 

Another  evening  in  Salem,  a  Saturday  evening,  I  think,  I 
went  through  the  saloons.  \Yord  had  come  to-  me  that  there  was 
almost  unrestrained  gambling  going  on.  I  took  a  young  work- 
ingman  with  me,  donned  a  soft  slouch  hat  which  had  been  new 
once  on  a  time,  and  rather  to  my  own  surprise  went  through 
thirteen  saloons  before  T  was  recognized.  If  I  had  but  known 
it  the  fact  itself  was  eloquent  with  witness  to  the  remoteness  of 
the  minister  and  the  churches  from  the  man  of  the  street. 

In  the  fourteenth  salwn  a  man  who  was  half  drunk  recog- 
nized me.  and  welcomed  me  with  maudlin  cordiality,  assuring 
me  that  I  was  doing  just  the  right  thing,  and  that  preachers 
ought  to  do  a  good  deal  more  of  seeing  the  sights  for  them- 
selves. I  was  not  as  much  impressed  with  either  his  welcome 
or  his  reasoning  at  the  time  as  I  was  afterward.  If  the  Man  of 
Nazareth  had  lived  in  Salem  I  suspect  that  every  man  alxntt 
town  would  have  known  Him  offhand. 

The  town  marshal  and  I  had  a  tilt  over  the  matter  in  the 
public  prints.  He  was  willing  enough,  so  he  said,  to  prosecute 
the  gamblers,  if  gambling  was  actually  going  on.  if  I  or  any- 
Ixxly  else  would  furnish  the  evidence.  I  have  met  that  attitude 
on  the  part  of  naH  officials  since,  and  a  good  deal  nearer  San 
Francisco.  I  shall  deal  with  it  more  at  length  in  due  time. 

Just  now  I  note  three  incidents  merely  to  mark  the  course 
of  my  contact  with  moral  derelicts  here  and  there  in  an  individ- 
ual way.  I  am  going  to  tell  of  the  larger  contact  with  humanity 


34. 

outside  of  the  churches  in  the  next  few  chapters,  with  the  "de- 
fective classes."  and  also  with  the  "higher-ups,"  to  use  popular 
terms.  I  want  now  just  to  mention  one  individual  more  who 
ministered  to  some  inner  discomfort  on  my  part,  and  helped 
me  to  see  Phariseeism  in  a  less  superficial  way. 

He  was  neither  good  nor  bad  as  the  labels  are  commonly 
used.  He  sat  in  the  church  sometimes  and  listened  to  me  with 
good-natured  tolerance  and  probably  considerable  appreciation  % 
of  certain  incidental  human  elements  in  my  preaching.  Liter- 
ary likings  drew  us  together  and  he  was  often  at  our  fireside 
of  a  winter  night.  He  did  some  work  for  the  Overland  Month- 
ly afterwards,  was  reporter  later  for  a  San  Francisco  daily  or 
two.  held  a  responsible  position  in  New  York  City  in  connection 
with  Pacific  Coast  promotion  work,  and  is  I  think  booming  the 
Panama  Exposition  now.  At  the  time  I  met  him,  he  was  work- 
ing in  a  hardware  store  in  Salem. 

\Yhen  I  think  of  the  hardware  store  I  think  of  some  of 
the  "jobs"  he  told  me  of  with  a  good-natured  laugh.  Some  of 
them  had  to  do  with  church  people,  and  the  "rake-offs"  which 
they  had  drawn  for  the  very  nails  which  were  used  in  the  build- 
ing of  the  churches..  He  was  not  a  cynic.  He  was  too  humor- 
ously healthy  for  that  sort  of  sentiment  to  prevail  in  him.  He 
made  no  effort  to  make  a  cynic  of  me.  I  could  not  make  a 
'"Christian"  of  him.  P>ut  we  helped  each  other  into  a  bigger  and 
more  human  feeling  toward  our  fellows.  I  gave  him  a  chance 
to  see  how  much  of  sincere  goodness  there  was  inside  the 
churches,  lovable  in  spite  of  its  posing  and  primping.  He  made 
me  see,  with  others  such  as  those  I  have  already  mentioned, 
how  much  there  is  of  badness  in  the  world,  if  I  may  put  it  that 
way.  which  has  a  strangely  human  lovableness  about  it.  I 
showed  him  the  gold  under  the  glitter,  he  showed  me  the  gold 
under  the  stain  and  dirt.  He  learned  that  among  the  good  it 
wasn't  all  pretense  on  top.  I  was  learning  that  among  the  bad, 
the  worldly,  even  the  disreputable,  there  were  veins  of  richest 
quality  underneath.  P>oth  together  we  were  coming  to  see 
slowly  that  the  only  goodness  which  is  very  much  worth  while, 
the  goodness  that  goes  deeper  than  all  the  "righteousness  of  the 
Scribes  and  Pharisees"  is  goodness  of  heart  toward  all  our  hu- 
mankind. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

PIETY  AND  PRISON  WALLS. 

I  am  puzzled  now  to  say  whether  it  was  goodness  of  heart 
toward  the  prisoners  first  of  all,  or  a  sense  of  professional  ob- 
ligation and  opportunity,  or  sheer  curiosity,  which  took  me 
first  to  the  penitentiary.  It  may  have  been  a  mixture  of  all 
these  moods. 

The  Oregon  penitentiary  was  the  first  which  I  had  ever 
seen  in  a  familiar  way ;  indeed,  the  first  of  which  I  had  ever 
seen  the  inside.  I  have  seen  very  few  since.  Prisons  are  as 
painful  to  me  as  slums,  and,  in  my  opinion  now  as  disgraceful 
to  the  civilization  which  sustains  them  both. 

There  were  no  women  in  the  Oregon  penitentiary  when  1 
was  at  Salem.  There  were  four  hundred  men.  Many  of  them 
were  young  men,  some  of  them  hardly  more  than  boys.  1  think 
the  average  age  was  ony  about  twenty-two  or  twenty-four.  The 
prisoners  were  employed,  in  the  main,  in  the  stove  factory  in 
the  east  yard. 

The  administration  was  very  liberal  then.  I  suppose  that 
is  the  term  to  use.  W.  S.  Downing,  the  superintendent,  was 
a  kindly  man,  not  at  all  of  the  sharp  or  professionally  politi- 
cal type.  He  did  not  look  professional  at  all.  You  might 
easily  have  taken  him  for  an  Oregon  fanner,  or  for  one  of 
the  easy-going  business  men  of  the  town  with  a  store  half  full 
of  goods  such  as  had  been  in  vogue  down  in  Maine  half  a 
century  before.  He  ran  the  institution  in  old-fashioned  ways, 
with  less  of  severity  than  the  old  times  knew,  but  with  little 
accounting  with  modern  ideas. 

1  had  access  to  the  penitentiary  on  almost  my  own  terms. 
I  came  and  went  with  freedom,  sitting  out  in  the  back  yard 
with  the  life-termers  and  talking  with  them  as  freely  as  I 
might  have  done  by  own  fireside.  The  going  in  and  the  coming 
out  was  always  with  careful  regard,  of  course,  to  the  safe- 
keeping of  the  prisoners,  and  I  did  not  venture  often  into  the 
shops,  and  never  without  the  presence  of  guards,  as  there  were 
men  sufficiently  desperate  among  those  thus  employed  to  have 
made  either  a  living  buttress  or  a  bloody  carcase  of  my  Inxly 
with  equal  unconcern.  But  among  the  old  fellows,  of  whom 
less  strenuous  tasks  were  required  and  who  sat  sometimes  aiul 
swapped  stories  in  the  shadow  of  the  buildings.  I  felt  all  the 
freedom  and  unconsciousness  which  their  dingy  suits  of  striped 
gray  cloth  would  permit. 


36. 

The  services  which  I  held  there  on  Siriday  afternoons 
were  generally  attended  by  a  good  delegation  of  my  people. 
Some  of  them  went  to  sing  and  some  only  to  sec  or.  at  the 
most,  to  hear  how  I  would  talk  to  the  men.  The  t;>  11  folks 
sat  in  the  same  room  with  the  prisoners,  but  to  one  side,  and 
on  the  other  side  to  my  left  was  the  organ  and  a  few  of  the 
best  singers.  In  front  of  me  sat  as  many  of  the  men  as  cared 
to  come  out  of  their  cells.  I  suspect  that  the  freedo  i  of  the 
hour  had  as  much  to  do  with  their  presence  as  any  interest 
in  what  I  might  say.  Many  would  not  come  for  sectarian 
reasons,  and  some  out  of  contempt  for  religion  and  ministers 
in  general.  The  ordinary  audience  was  probably  125  to  150 
men.  The  place  where  we  met,  which  I  have  called  a  room, 
was  the  open  space  between  the  tiers  of  cells  in  the  center 
of  the  building,  from  which  the  iron  cages  reached  away  north 
and  south,  both  upstairs  and  down.  It  was  almost  as  diffi- 
cult to  speak  there  as  I  have  found  it  since  out  of  doors. 

My  preaching  was  not  very  gentle,  I  am  afraid.  I  was 
shy  of  "sentimentalism"  toward  the  prisoners  in  those  days, 
and  had  been  brought  up  on  the  old  prayer-book  adage  con- 
cerning the  law  and  its  officers  as  "a  terror  to  evil-doers." 
I  was  not  unsympathetic,  but  I  held  conventional  and  gen- 
erally accepted  ideas  about  the  criminal  classes.  Incidentally 
1  may  remark  that  at  that  time  and  for  a  considerable  while 
afterward  I  believed  in  capital  punishment. 

The  first  of  the  prisoners  whom  I  came  to  know  in  a 
personal  way  was  a  man  who  would  have  been  hanged  if  he 
had  been  a  negro.  His  name  was  not  Williams,  but  that  will 
do  to  identify  him  here.  He  was  about  forty-five  or  fifty  years 
of  age  and  had  been  in  the  penitentiary  in  the  neighborhood  of 
eight  years  when  I  met  him,  perhaps  not  quite  as  long.  He 
was  a  quiet,  inoffensive  sort  of  man,  inclined  to  be  religious. 
I  did  not  take  his  religious  professions  very  sericvsly  at  the 
beginning.  If  they  had  any  influence  uj>on  me  they  rather 
prejudiced  me  against  him.  I  suspected  that  he  was  cultivat- 
ing the  preacher  so  as  to  get  a  pardon  the  sooner.  The  facts 
in  his  case  did  not  help  him  much  in  my  mind. 

On  the  road  north  of  Salem  there  lived  an  old  farmer 
with  a  German  name,  whose  wife  was  unfaithful  to  him.  Her 
paramour  was  a  negro.  This  man  Williams  also  fell  under 
the  domination  of  the  negro,  who  kept  him  drunk  for  weeks 
at  a  time.  One  night  the  negro  and  Williams  lay  in  the  fence 
corner  when  the  old  man  was  expected  home  and  shot  him 
down  in  his  wagon.  Two  guns  were  used,  one  of  them  a 
gun  which  Williams  had  carried.  Williams'  claimed  from  first 


37. 

to  last  that  he  had  done  no  shooting  himseu.  He  admitted 
that  he  had  been  a  weak,  drunken  fool,  and  that  he  had  not 
been  sober  for  many  days  before  the  crime  was  done.  The 
negro  had  used  him  as  a  stool  pigeon.  At  the  fatal  moment 
the  negro,  after  firing  with  his  own  gun,  had  grasped  Wil- 
liams' gun  and  used  that  to  complete  the  job. 

The  negro  was  hanged,  as  there  is  no  doubt  he  deserved 
to  be.  Williams  can  not  be  said  on  the  strength  of  his  story, 
even  if  it  was  true,  to  have  deserved  much  better.  The  color 
of  his  skin,  and  possibly  some  cash  and  influence  at  his  com- 
mand, saved  his  neck,  and  he  was  sent  to  the  penitentiary  for 
life.  The  average  life  sentence  in  Oregon  at  that  time  was 
actually  about  eleven  years.  Williams  served  nine. 

I  was  very  slow  in  taking  his  part,  and  was  never  very 
active  for  him.  Convinced  at  length  by  watching  him  critical- 
ly myself  for  a  year  or  two,  and  by  the  common  testimony  of 
prison  officials  and  outside  parties  who  had  known  him  much 
longer  and  more  intimately  than  I.  and  by  the  concessions  of 
even  some  among  his  fellow  prisoners.  I  went  to  Governor 
Pennoyer,  with  whom  I  had  a  measure  of  acquaintance  and 
influence,  and  got  the  pardon. 

I  could  write  much  of  the  morning  when  I  received  it  and 
'.vent  out  to  the  prison  with  it  in  my  pocket,  and  of  the  marvel- 
ously  quiet  way  in  which  the  man  heard  the  news  of  his  re- 
lease. He  stopped  in  our  home  that  night,  had  breakfast  with 
us  the  next  morning,  and  I  kept  tab  on  him  for  a  while, 
though  I  have  lost  track  of  him  long  ago.  Two  things  only 
I  wn-^t  to  emphasize  in  connection  with  his  case. 

To  get  the  pardon  he  had  to  have  a  petition,  or  recom- 
mendation, signed  bv  certain  of  the  legal  authorities  who  had 
*ent  him  up.  To  obtain  this  he  was  compelled  to  raise  $100. 
which  he  did  through  some  relatives  almost  as  poor  as  him- 
self. 1  mentioned  the  matter  casually  to  the  governor,  who 
was  finite  indignant  about  it. 

"I'nless  that  money  is  pulled  down  I  will  not  touch  pen 
to  his  pardon."  said  Pcnnoyer. 

I  knew  him  well  enouirh  to  believe  that  he  meant  what 
he  said.  Williams,  when  informed  of  the  hitch  with  the  (iov- 
ernor.  was  depressed,  but  a  few  days  later  told  me  the  $100  de- 
txisit  had  been  withdrawn.  After  he  was  out  he  confessed 
confidentially  that  In-  had  had  to  pay  the  $100.  though  in  a 
mure  indirect  way. 

Williams  was  turned  loose  with  $5  and  a  cheap  Miit  of 
clothes.  He  lived — as  long  as  I  knew  him — a  quiet,  law-abid- 
ing life.  His  was  not  a  strong  character,  but  he  was  a  better 


38. 

man  at  many  points  than  a  lot  of  the  successful  men  whom 
I  have  known — more  kindly,  less  mercenary  and  nat- 
urally much  less  self-assertive  and  indifferent  to  the 
rights  of  others-  His  punishment  was  not  too  severe,,  but 
it  might  have  been  more  human  and  less  mechanical  while 
he  was  in  jail,  and  society  might  have  recognized  much 
more  rationally  its  own  part  in  his  crime  and  its  in- 
terest in  giving  him  a  larger  chance  to  redeem  his  later  years. 
So  far  as  the  State  was  concerned  his  liberty  was  made  de- 
pendent upon  personal  influences  and  even  commercial  con- 
siderations to  a  disgraceful  degree,  and  when  he  was  turned 
out  he  was  put  forth  with  less  purpose  and  provision  than 
a  sensible  farmer  would  show  in  the  disposition  of  an  old 
horse. 

My  Sunday  afternoon  services  5n  the  Oregon  peniten- 
tiary were  a  good  deal  of  a  strain  upon  me  in  a  physical  way. 
I  carried  at  that  time  four  and  sometimes  five  services  a  day. 
But  the  strain  upon  my  feelings  was  much  greater  than  the 
direct  physical  exhaustion,  and  T  was  forced  to  ease  up 'on 
the  work  before  I  left  Salem.  The  hardest  part  of  the  strain 
was  the  extent  to  which  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  law's 
dealings  with  the  men  behind  the  bars  outraged  my  sense  of 
all  that  was  decent  and  right  and  just. 

I  kept  no  notes  and  I  cannot  reproduce  particulars  now 
as  I  knew  them  then.  I  can  only  testify  that,  as  in  old  Mex- 
ico, the  stupidities  of  the  street  stirred  me  to  a  continual  storm 
of  inner  protest,  the  stupidities  of  the  Oregon  courts  stirred 
me  to  an  even  greater  degree  because  I  felt  that  there  was 
less  allowance  to  be  made.  I  was  mad  inside  whenever  I  spent 
an  hour  or  two  at  the  penitentiary,  utterly  disgusted  and  de- 
pressed both  with  the  low  moral  levels  of  the  prisoners  and 
more  so  with  what  I  learned  of  society's  selfish,  sordid  and 
worse  than  stupid  dealings  with  them. 

Here,  for  instance,  was  a  man  sent  up  for  three  years 
for  stealing  a  salmon,  while  in  the  same  prison  and  approx- 
imately at  the  same  time  was  another  who  had  shot  one  of 
his  fellows  down  in  Portland,  had  been  two  or  three  times 
condemned  to  be  hanged,  and  had  at  length  escaped  through 
the  adeptness  of  'his  attorneys,  or  for  reasons  even  less  ra- 
tional, with  a  term  of  one  year,  which  on  good  behavior  was 
reduced  to  ten  months. 

Here  was  a  lad  who,  bullied  into  a  state  of  reckless  bit- 
terness by  a  boy  bigger  than  himself,  after  vainly  warning 
his  tormenter,  had,  in  a  moment  of  passion  on  the  way  home. 


39. 

from  Sunday  school,  struck  his  older  companion  with  his  jack- 
knife.  The  wound  proved  fatal,  and  the  boy  was  there  among 
the  life-termers,  as  -though  society  had  no  responsibility  in 
the  matter  beyond  putting  him  out  of  the  way. 

The  cleverest  man  in  the  penitentiary,  a  Harvard  grad- 
uate, had  been  condemned  to  be  hanged,  though  he  pleaded 
self-defense.  His  request  for  a  new  trial  had  been  denied,  and 
the  court  had  adjourned  for  the  season,  beyond  the  day  when 
he  was  to  be  hanged.  He  got  a  small  file  surreptitiously,  fixed 
the  doors  of  his  cell  so  that  the  grand  jury  inspected  it  a  few- 
hours  before  he  took  French  leave  of  it  without  suspicion  that 
anything  was  wrong,  and  mocked  them  and  the  law  by  provid- 
ing the  same  newspaper  which  published  the  grand  jury's  re- 
port with  a  simultaneous  news  item  to  the  effect  that  he  was 
gone.  He  stayed  out  till  the  court  reconvened,  surrendered 
himself  then,  secured  another  trial  and  got  a  life  sentence, 
which  ended  in  pardon,  of  course. 

Take  them  all  in  all.  criminals  are  a  stupid  lot.  but  so- 
ciety's dealing  with  them  is  only  a  little  less  stupid — and  crim- 
inal. Our  system  of  dealing  with  the  slum  product  is  as  heart- 
sickening  as  the  slums  themselves.  And 'our  first  aid  for  the 
criminally  wounded  who  have  fallen  into  open  pits  of  passion, 
or  over  stumbling  stones  of  misplaced  circumstances,  is  as 
crude  and  barbaric  as  was  the  surgery  of  our  forefathers. 
The  prisons  are  much  more  than  laboratories  of  crime — they 
are  glaring  exhibits  of  the  ignorance,  apathy,  the  mercenary 
contentment  and  the  unconscious  cruelties  of  the  good. 


CHAPTER  X. 

THE  SANE  AND  INSANE. 

The  State  Asylum  for  the  Insane  at  Salem  was  on  the 
same  side  of  town  as  the  penitentiary,  about  a  mile  north- 
ward of  the  prison.  The  grounds  were  open  here,  were  very 
beautifully  kepj,  and  the  buildings  made  the  appearance  from 
the  road  of  a  college  or  hospital  or  some  sort  of  public  home. 
It  was  a  hospital  in  name,  and  I  think  that  conception  of  its 
function  was  kept  carefully  to  the  front.  Doctor  Rowland, 
who  had  charge  of  it,  was  a  genial,  almost  motherly  man. 

Commonly.  I  alternated  my  Sunday  afternoons  at  the 
penitentiary  with  my  Sunday  afternoons  at  th/e  ,vasylum,  al- 
though on  one  or  two  rare  occasions  I  preached  at  both  places 
besides  my  three  appointments  down  town  the  same  day.  The 
service  at  both  places  was  purely  voluntary  on  my  part,  and 
I  did  not  receive  even  my  expenses  when  I  went  and  came 
to  and  from  the  penitentiary  by  the  cars.  I  am  glad  to  re- 
member now  that  it  was  an  unpaid  service  which  I  gave. 

My  first  afternoon  at  the  asylum  was  more  uncomfort- 
able than  my  first  preaclrnr  service  in  the  neighboring  prison. 
The  audience  was  about  the  same  in  size.  The  room  was 
better,  a  hall  provided  for  entertainments  and  social  affairs, 
where  dancing  was  commonly  done  the  night  before.  Some 
of  them  did  not  know  the  difference  between  my  preaching 
and  the  music  for  the  dance. 

"I  like  to  hear  you  sing,"  said  one  of  them  to  me,  with 
a  grin  which  covered  all  his  foolish  face ;  "it's  bully !" 

That  was  before  the  days  of  Roosevelt,  too. 

The  most  disconcerting  man  in  my  audience  that  first 
Sunday  was  a  man  who  was  an  adept  at  wriggling  his  scalp. 
If  T  looked  in  his  direction  he  kept  the  whole  top  of  his  head, 
which  was  well  covered  with  hair,  going  back  and  forth  with 
an  effect  that  was  quite  uncanny.  The  movements  of  his 
head  were  all  on  the  outside ;  there  was  nothing  but  an  al- 
most idotic  paralysis  underneath. 

Occasionally  a  man  got  up  and  swore  at  me  under  the 
impression  that  I  was  saying  something  in  a  personal  way, 
and  was  led  out  by  the  attendants,  protesting  as  he  went. 
Generally  speaking,  the  patients  were  remarkably  well  be- 
haved. I  had  more  trouble  with  deliberate  inattention  and 


41. 

conscious  discourtesy  sometimes  of  a  Sunday  evening  in  town. 
I  learned  to  preach  as  easily  before  the  audience  at  the  asylum 
as  before  my  own  people,  used  the  same  sermons,  and  came  to 
feel  that  whether  my  hearers  were  convicts,  "crazies/'  or  the 
conventional  congregation,  the  human  factor  was  the  biggest 
in  them  all.  Despite  their  superficial  differences  they  were 
wonderfully  alike. 

The  attendants  usually  sat  by  themselves  at  the  rear  of 
the  hall  to  my  left.  Some  of  them  were  women.  They  were 
dressed  more  like  outsiders  than  were  the  patients  as  a  rule. 
Had  they  been  scattered  through  the  audience  kind  dressed 
the  same  I  could  not  always  have  picked  them  out.  And  this 
not  because  they  looked  less  than  normal,  but  because  so  many 
of  the  patients  made  as  good  an  appearance  as  the  average 
of  men  and  women  outside. 

One  young  woman  puzzled  me  a  good  deal  the  first  time 
she  was  there.  She  sat  with  the  attendants  and  was  as  well 
dressed  as  any  of  them.  Only  an  excessive  nervousness  made 
me  suspect  that  she  was  a  patient.-  This  suspicion  was  con- 
firmed when  the  sermon  was  done.  She  recovered  after  a  few 
months. 

Two  of  her  sayings  have  stayed  with  me.  Once  when 
I  had  closed  the  service  she  took  my  hand  as  I  went  out, 
and  without  any  effusiveness  said,  in  her  quick,  nervous  way, 
"1  like  to  hear  you  preach.  You  talk  to  us  as  if  we  had  some 
sense,  and  we  have,  if  we  are  crazy." 

The  whole  philosophy  of  the  changed  attitude  toward  the 
insane  which  has  made  hospitals  of  our  former  "mad-houses" 
was  in  that  saying.  We  are  moving  rationally  toward  the 
treatment  of  the  irrational.  \Ve  shall  never  move  morally 
toward  the  treatment  of  the  immoral  till  we  treat  them  as  if 
they  had  character  in  spite  of  their  crimes. 

Another  time  I  was  passing  through  4he  asylum  with 
some  friends.  Many  of  the  patients  who  knew  me  came  up 
to  speak  with  me  as  I  passed  through  the  wards.  This  young 
woman  greeted  me  cordially  when  we  entered  the  ward  where 
she  was.  As  she  was  ready  to  go  she  said  to  our  guide,  one 
of  the  attendants: 

"I  wish  you  would  tell  the  doctor  I  have  need  of  him  to  at- 
tend to  two  teeth." 

"Your  teeth?"  queried  the  attendant,   will  a  grin. 

He  was  a  rather  common  looking  fellow  and  would  have 
taken  for  a  patient  much  sooner  than   herself. 

With  utmost  scorn  she  turned  upon  him : 

'I  wouldn't  be  very  likely  to  be  troubling  the  doctor  about 


42. 

other  people's  teeth,"  she  said,  and  swept  away  from  him  with  the 
dignity  of  a  queen. 

There  is  a  great  deal  of  need  yet  of  seeing  to  it,  both  in 
the  asylums  and  out  of  them,  that  the  attendants  shall*-  equal 
in  character  those  upon  whom  they  attend. 

I  sat  in  the  superintendent's  office  one  day  with  another 
patient,  a  man  of  about  60  years.  He  was  well  known  in 
Oregon  and  had  been  associated  with  some  of  the  big  build- 
ers of  the  State.  He  was  a  thinker,  a  philosopher,  and  be- 
fore I  had  talked  with  him  fifteen  minutes  I  felt  very  imma- 
ture' in  his  presence.  Had  I  met  him  anywhere  else  I  would 
have  been  even  more  abashed.  He  recovered  his  normal  mind 
and  was  released  a  little  later. 

The  thing  that  impressed  me  that  day  was  the  unaffected 
dignity  and  consideration  with  which  he  was  treated.  He 
was  met  on  every  hand,  so  far  as  I  could  see,  as  if  he  were 
still  a  man. 

There  were  doubtless  abuses  in  the  Oregon  Hospital  for 
the  Insane,  but  it  was,  on.  the  whole,  the  most  rational  society 
which  I  have  ever  seen.  The  people  were  all  comfortably 
housed,  all  comfortably  clothed,  all  comfortably  fed.  The 
strong  waited  upon  the  weak,  <and  ministered  to  them.  A 
man,  though  crazy,  was  recognized  as  a  man  "for  'a  that  and 
'a  that.''  Men  were  not  blamed  for  their  misfortunes,  though 
many  were  undoubtedly  to  blame.  Those  who  came  there 
through  their  own  excesses  were  met  with  the  same  consid- 
eration as  those  who  had  slipped  a  cog  in  their  mental  ma- 
chinery by  some  accident  of  circumstance.  There  was  as  much 
wickedness  housed  there  as  there  was  in  the  penitentiary,  for 
insanity  is  in  the  multitude  of  instances  a  by-product  of  sin. 
But  it  was  treated  in  a  radically  different  way,  from  a  radi- 
cally different  point  of  view.  Blame  reigned  behind  the  dull 
gray  walls  of  the  penitentiary.  Brotherhood  reigned  in  the 
homelike  hospital  on  .the  other  road. 

I  am  not  a  Christian  Scientist,  although  I  have  read  Chris- 
tian Science  literature  freely  for  twenty  years.  I  have  come,  I 
hope,  to  the  Christian  attitude  toward  it,  which  is  one  of  sincere 
rejoicing  in  all  the  good  its  followers  do.  Of  this  also  I  am 
quite  sure,  that  if  their  fundamental  ideas,  leaving  philosophical 
and  religious  forms  aside  for  the  moment,  could  more  generally 
prevail,  there  would  be  vastly  less  of  insanity  than  there  is.  Even 
as  our  institutions  are.  serener  moods  and  more  trustful  atti- 
tudes would  save  many  from  both  mental  and  moral  wreck. 

But  it  is  a  pity  that  good  people  cannot  be  as  good  toward 
their  fellows  who  are  reckoned  sane  as  towards  those  who  have 


43. 

been  made  public  wards  by  a  commission  on  lunacy.  God 
knows  there  are  abuses  enough  in  our  hospitals  yet,  but  at  least 
they  are  not  of  public  intention.  Only  last  night  a  woman  told 
me  of  the  death  of  her  sister  in  one  of  the  State  institutions  of 
California  through  cold  and  want  of  sufficient  food  and  the 
neglect  of  her  attendants.  But  even  she  did  not  maintain  that 
the  people  intended  it  so.  There  is  one  class,  anyway,  toward 
whom  good  people  mean  to  be  good  today,  and  those  are  the 
people  who  have  failed  in  the  one  point  which  most  differen- 
tiates the  man  and  the  beast. 

While  yet  a  student  preacher  one  summer  in  Vermont, 
they  showed  me  at  the  poor  farm  a  woman  who  had  been  insane 
for  forty  years.  They  could  not  keep  a  garment  upon  her,  ex- 
cept a  single,  strong  heavy  serge.  She  could  neither  stand  nor 
talk.  Never  have  I  looked  into  such  pathetic  eyes  as  hers.  She 
knew  less  than  the  deer  which  smote  me  to  the  heart  with  his 
dying  glances  in  the  California  mountains.  Her  muteness,  and 
the  straining  of  her  soul  against  its  long  bondage  to  the  flesh, 
smote  me  more. 

Yet  she  was  treated  with  more  of  public  concern  than  the 
ordinary  working  woman  of  the  State.  The  good  were  good  to 
her,  as  good  as  their  ordinary  absorption  in  their  own  affairs 
would  allow  them  to  be.  Had  she  been  sane  she  would  have 
been  less  a  sister  than  she  was  in  her  stolid,  brutelike  state  . 

Many  of  the  patients  at  the  asylum  in  Salem  were  perfectly 
sane  except  on  a  single  line.  One  of  them,  who  worked  alxnit 
the  farm,  was  so  normal  in  most  matters  that  I  was  told  you 
could  talk  with  him  for  a  week  without  suspecting  that  then- 
was  anything  wrong  with  him.  It  was  only  when  you  talked 
about  Mexico  that  he  was  queer.  Then  he  was  voluble  with 
protests  as  to  his  rights  there.  He  was  a  king,  or  priive.  or 
something  of  that  sort  with  respect  to  Mexico.  There  are  peo- 
ple running  newspapers  now  who  are  more  dangerously  out  of 
their  heads  whenever  Mexico  is  named. 

It  was  much  the  same  with  the  attendants  after  all.  Talk 
with  them  on  most  lines  and  they  were  rational  enough.  It  was 
only  when  you  tried  to  reason  with  them  alxnit  a  sane  social 
order,  as  brotherly  outside  of  the  asylum  as  that  which  they 
were  supposed  to  administer  inside  the  asylum,  that  they  grew 
uneasy  and  incoherent  in  their  replies.  And  that  which  was  true 
of  them  was  true  of  my  people,  the  very  best  of  them,  down 
town. 


CHAPTER  XL 

PRAYING  FOR  THE  POLITICIANS. 

I  did  no  lobbying  in  the  Legislature  at  Salem,  but  I  took  my  | 
part  with  the  other  preachers  of  the  town  in  praying  for  the  I 
politicians. 

Like  the  preaching  at  the  penitentiary  and  the  asylum,  the  I 
praying  in  the  Legislature  was  entirely  voluntary  and  unpaid,  j 
That  was  the  redeeming  feature  of  it,  in  my  opinion  both  then  I 
and  now.  In  general  I  think  that  paid  chaplaincies  cost  the  I 
cause  of  religion  more  than  any  advantage  which  they  bring  to  I 
those  who  are  supposed  to  be  served  by  them  can  offset.  Espe- 
cially does  it  seem  to  me  that  praying  for  the  legislators  at  S5  j 
a  prayer  is  a  most  questionable  use  of  public  money. 

I  am  not  sure  that  praying  for  them  for  nothing,  in  a  pub- 
lic way,  is  worth  much  more  than  it  costs.  Possibly  the  fault 
was  mine,  but  I  found  it  exceedingly  hard  to  talk  with  God  in 
that  official  way,  and  in  the  presence  of  many  to  whom  my 
prayers  were  a  mere  mumbling  of  words.  There  may  have  been 
some  who  were  sincerely  on  the  side  of  such  a  service,  and  who 
followed  me  as  devoutly  as  they  would  have  done  in  church. 
If  so,  none  of  them  said  so.  The  general  expression  was  one 
of  more  or  less  polite  suffrance  of  a  conventional  custom  which 
it  was  not  good  politics  to  ignore  or  obstruct. 

The  only  cane  which  I  have  kept  of  several  which  have 
come  to  me  in  one  way  and  another  during  my  ministry  stands 
close  at  hand  now.  I  keep  it  as  a  curio,  never  having  had  any 
occasion  to  use  that  sort  of  thing,  either  for  support  or  for  dis- 
play. It  was  passed  out  to  me  through  the  postoffice  window  by 
Fred  Lockley,  I  think,  afterwards  prominent  on  the  editorial 
staff  of  the  Pacific  Monthly,  and  frequently  in  those  days  one 
of  our  fireside  group  in  the  parsonage,  although  not  of  my  con- 
gregation. Lockley  smiled  ati  my  perplexity  when  I  received  it, 
and  would  give  no  other  information  than  that  it  was  a  token 
of  esteem  to  me  from  certain  members  of  the  Oregon  Legisla- 
ture, BECAUSE  OF  MY  SHORT  PRAYERS. 

My  prayers  were  short  because  I  felt  that  the  whole  pro- 
ceeding was  more  or  less  of  a  sham,  and  I  have  always  been 
inclined  to  cut  shams  short.  I  knew  that  the  legislators  were 
there  to  do  the  business  of  the  State,  whether  they  did  it  or  not. 
For  that  purpose  they  were  paid,  and  not  to  hear  my  prayers. 
If  they  were  men  of  sense  and  sound  purpose  they  had  no  spe- 
cial need  of  any  such  formalism,  and  if  they  were  not  the  for- 


45. 

malism  was  of  no  value  to  them  and  only  made  the  mockery 
of  the  whole  situation  a  little  worse.  There  is  just  as  much  rea- 
son for  opening  a  factory  with  prayer  every  morning  as  there 
is  for  opening  a  legislature.  If  the  service  was  paid  for  in  either 
case  the  money  would,  in  the  last  analysis,  come  out  of  the 
pockets  of  the  common  people. 

The  prayer  was  the  first  thing  on  the  program  each  day. 
The  minister  sat  beside  the  speaker  of  the  assembly,  or  the 
president  of  the  senate,  by  whom  he  was  received  with  a  cour- 
teous hand-shake  and  the  polite  suavity  with  which  politicians 
delight  to  decorate  the  minister  who  is  content  to  be  a  ritualistic 
figure-head  and  let  the  politician  have  his  way  in  practical  af- 
fairs. The  spoilers  of  the  public  like  to  have  ministers,  and 
women,  attend  to  their  millinery.  Politics  are  likely  to  stain  the 
skirts  of  both  of  them,  you  know. 

Although  a  little  more  inclined  than  the  other  ministers  of 
Salem  to  discuss  public  affairs  in  the  pulpit  I  was  practically 
as  innocuous  as  the  rest  of  them,  because  equally  ignorant  with 
my  brethren  of  the  cloth  of  economic  law.  I  knew  the  ship  of 
state  was  a  good  deal  of  a  failure  in  those  days  so  far  as  the 
interests  of  all  the  people  were  concerned.  I  was  inclined  to 
blame  the  legislators  then  much  more  than  T  would  blame  them 
now.  I  can  see  now  that  neither  the  men  who  were  praying  for 
the  Legislature,  nor  the  men  who  were  swearing  at  it.  were 
going  at  the  matter  in  a  very  sensible  way.  There  were  goorl 
men  in  that  Legislature  who  were  groping  helplessly  toward 
better  things.  There  were  some  who  were  quite  content  to  be 
the  servitors  of  the  special  interests,  and  had  the  feeling  that  if 
the  people  were  fools  they  might  as  well  have  the  feathers.  I  Jut 
most  of  them  were  as  ignorant  as  T  was  of  the  way  out  of  the 
wilderness,  and  because  they  were  the  chosen  leaders  of  the 
people,  and  were  blind,  they  were  ditching  the  public  from  year 
to  year  worse  than  the  criminals  at  the  penitentiary  or  the  crazies 
at  the  asylum.  Well-intentioned  ignorance  is  often  more  danger- 
ous than  cvil-intentioned  vice,  and  the  wisdom  that  is  not  wise  is 
more  mischievous  than  the  follv  that  is  plainly  foolish. 

Joseph  Simon  of  Portland  was  the  president  of  the  senate. 
An  almost  audible  smile  went  around  that  Ixuly  of  legislators 
when  1  prayed  for  him  in  particular  one  day.  It  was  a  short 
prayer,  not  more  than  two  sentences,  and  it  was  carefully  word- 
<*<l  so  as  to  express  genuine  Christian  goodwill,  and  to  be  as  far 
removed  as  possible  from  any  appearance  of  wlitical  or  per- 
sonal suggestion.  Possibly  the  spectacle  of  a  Christian  minister 
praying  publicly  for  a  Jew  had  something  to  do  with  the  humor 
of  the  hour  for  a  few  of  those  there.  I  suspect,  howcvre,  that 


46. 

it  was  the  known  political  primacy  of  Simon  at  that  time,  and 
his  good  standing  with  all  those  forces  in  the  State  which  ought 
to  have  been  of  bad  standing  with  the  people,  that  furnished  the 
facetiousness  of  the  occasion  to  those  who  were  on  the  inside 
of  public  affairs.  They  were  perfectly  willing  to  have  all  the 
preachers  in  the  State  praying  for  their  leaders  as  long  as  the 
profits  of  the  leadership  were  not  disturbed. 

Years,  afterwards  I  preached  before  a  certain  college  on 
the  Pacific  Coast  which  shall  be  nameless  here.  I  dined  with 
the  faculty  after  the  service.  One  of  them  was  from  Portland. 
I  happened  to  mention  Mr.  Simon  in  connection  with  my  ex- 
periences in  Oregon  and  referred  with  no  asperity  to  his  part 
in  the  politics  of  Oregon  at  the  time.  The  professor  with  whom 
I  was  talking  bristled  instantly,  and  expressed  for  him  the 
highest  personal  regard.  I  could  not  question  it,  as '  my  ac- 
quaintance with  Mr.  Simon  was  of  the  most  casual  kind,  and  the 
professor  avowed^an  intimate  personal  contact  with  him  cover- 
ing many  years.  T  had  no  disposition  to  question  it.  By  that 
time  T  had  learned  that  a  little  worse  than  a  bad  czar  is  a  good 
one.  and  every  abuse  in  the  world  hides  behind  personal  virtue 
to  much  better  advantage  than  when  it  is  compelled  to  consent 
in  its  champions  to  open  vice.  Let  those  who  can  understand 
this  parable  understand  it  here :  for  others  I  shall  repeat  it  in 
mnny  forms  before  I  am  done  with  this  story  of  how  I  came  to 
understand  it  myself. 

One  of  the  Salem  ministers  who  did  not  pray,  in  public 
anyway,  for  the  legislators  was  M.  V.  Rork.  I  doubt  much 
whether  he  prayed  for  them  in  private,  except  as  he  may  have 
included  all  sinners  in  his  universal  good  will.  When  he  talked 
of  them  his  words  didn't  'have  a  very  pious  sound. 

Rork  was  not  a  pastor  in  Salem  then,  although  he  had  min- 
istered, T  think,  to  the  Unitarian  congregation  there.  He  was 
of  orthodox  training,  and.  if  T  mistake  not.  had  known  some 
actual  service  in  the  orthodox  ministry.  At  the  time  I  was  there 
he  was  a  free  lance  and  regarded  very  much  askance  by  all  the 
orthodox  people.  Most  of  them  when  they  discussed  him  dis- 
missed him  as  "erratic,"  which  is  a  cheaper  method  of  dispos- 
ing of  heretics,  both  religious  and  political,  than  the  old-fash- 
ioned way  of  burning  them,  the  way  of  the  "oldtime  religion," 
and  state.  I  think  some  fagots  could  have  been  found  for 
Rork's  burning,  however,  if  it  had  been  according  to  law. 

Rork  did  a  little  burning  on  his  own  account  in  the  way  of 
caustic  speech.  He  was  a  brilliant  fellow,  whether  he  was  erratic 
or  not.  and  if  T  had  known  my  opj)ortunity  better  I  would  have 
fellowshipped  him  much  more  intimately  than  I  did.  I  knew 


47. 

„  sane"  men  of  Salem,  of  whom  there  were  alto- 
..iy  in  those  days.    It  was  a  few  of  the  "fools"  who 
.ate.    Rork  was  one  of  them. 

^on  was  already  restless  in  the  rural  districts  by  reason 
oeed-sowing  of  such  men  as  Rork.     Here  and  there  were 

ps  of  political  fanatics  who  were  the  pioneers  of  the  pro- 
^ssive  philosophy  which  governs  the  State  today.  How  Rork 
and  his  fellow  agitators  lived  I  do  not  know.  Rork  interested 
me  a  good  deal,  and  amused  me  often.  I  had  the  attitude  to- 
ward him  inside  of  the  man  who  prides  himself  on  being  "rea- 
sonably progressive,"  but  on  having  sense  enough  to  avoid  all 
extravagances.  I  could  praise  him  against  those  who  damned 
him  altogether,  and,  with  a  sense  of  virtue  that  was  doubled 
by  my  championship  of  him  and  my  own  "better-balanced  pro- 
gressiveness,"  I  could  criticize  him  complacently  at  the  same 
time.  I  have  a  choice  assortment  of  friends  of  the  same  sort 
today. 

I  have  forgotten  all  the  Oregon  politicians  except  one  or 
two.  Some  of  them  got  their  names  in  "Who's  Who."  and  1 
do  not  think  that  Rork's  name  has  ever  been  there.  Here  and 
there  a  magazine  of  national  prominence  has  recognized  the 
fundamental  work  which  he  and  a  few  of  his  fellows,  some  of 
them  men  of  greater  reputation  now,  did  for  self-government 
in  the  "Webfoot"  State.  "Web-foot"  she  may  have  been  in 
those  days,  and  there  are  some  sneering  scorners  of  real  dem- 
ocracy who  still  would  have  it  that  she  is  a  land  of  "quacks." 
I  know  of  no  State  which  has  made  nobler  progress  toward 
popular  government  and  the  recognition  of  the  deeper  meanings 
of  democracy  than  has  Oregon  in  the  last  twenty  years.  I  wish 
I  had  helped  more  when  I  was  there,  and  had  dared  more  for 
the  sake  of  the  democracy  which  was  already  dawning  in  a  few 
flaming  eyes.  But  I  was  afraid  of  crimson  colors  then.  Even 
Governor  Pennoyer  was  more  erratic  than  prophetic  to  me. 

1'ennoyer  was  a  Democrat,  and  the  State  was  inclined  to 
be  Republican  He  was  not  even  an  orthodox  Democrat  in  those 
days.  He  was  too  progressive  for  his  own  party.  I  remember 
one  of  his  stories,  of  which  he  told  me  many,  was  to  this  effect : 

An  Indian  lost  in  the  woods,  was  met  by  some  friendly 
hunters  who  asked  him  solicitously,  "Are  you  lost?" 

"No,  no,"  replied  the  Indian  impatiently,  "Indian  not  lost, 
wigwam  lost." 

It  was  not  the  Democratic  (xwernor  of  Oregon  who  was 
lost  in  those  days,  accofding  to  his  own  opinion,  it  was  the  Dem- 
ocratic party.  And  most  men  of  forward  sense  would  admit 
today  that  Pennoyer  was  right. 


48. 

He  was  a  brilliant  writer,  and  a  capital  story-teller.  I  liked 
to  talk  with  him,  and  more  than  half  way  belie  vjd  in  hua.  But 
I  was  too  "sensible"  then  to  have  sense  enough  to  understand 
him.  The  common  people  received  him  as  a  prophet,  and  they 
had  a  measure  of  the  prophet's  reward,  the  measure  being  ac- 
cording to  the  measure  of  their  faith.  He  died  before  his  day 
had  fully  come. 

The  men  who  live  largest  in  my  memory  of  Oregon  politics 
today  are  the  men  who  lived  nearest  to  the  people,  who  had 
themselves  the  largest  faith  in  plain  human  nature,  and  whom 
neither  the  churches,  nor  the  schools,  nor  the  political  parties 
understood.  They  were  both  brainy  men,  and  moral  men,  but 
"they  came  unto  their  own,  and  their  own  received  them  not." 


CHAPTER  XIL 

THE  RELIGIOUS  PRESS. 

I  was  a  bare-footed,  bare-legged,  bare  headed  boy  on  the 
Towa  prairies,  dressed  principally  all  the  summer  long  in  freck- 
les and  fresh-air,  when  1  made  my  first  acquaintance  with  a  re- 
ligions newspaper. 

Our  home  was  one  of  the  most  hospitable  homes  on  the 
prairies.  My  father  could  not  turn  even  a  tramp  away.  The  re- 
sult was.some  very  interesting  experiences  for  us  youngsters,  to 
whom  a  stranger  was  newspaper,  drama,  and  social  function  all 
in  one.  Some  of  the  sayings  of  the  strangers  who  tarried  with 
us  ever  night  are  household  words  in  the  family  to  this  day. 

The  tramps  came  oftener  than  the  preachers.  I  think  they 
interested  me  more  in  those  days.  They  were  more  picturesque, 
more  intimate,  more  human.  They  didn't  put  their  hands  on  my 
bend  and  talk  solemn  talk  to  me  in  the  presence  of  my  elders. 
Ministers  were  a  decidedly  awesome  lot  to  me  then. 

There  were  compensations,  however,  even  in  the  matter  of 
visiting  ministers,  the  chief  of  which  was  sized  up  very  well  in 
a  little  item  that  I  read' the  other  day.  At  a  certain  home  where 
the  visitinir  minister  was  eating  dinner  he  asked  for  a  second 
helping.  Seeing  the  eyes  of  the  small  lx\v  upon  him,  he  re- 
marked apologetically : 

"I  don't  alwavs  hive  a  dinner  like  this.  Johnny." 

To  which  the  <»vnll  1x>y  promptly  and  illuminatingly  replied : 

"  \Ye  don't,  either." 

Despite  a  certain  note  in  this  story  to  which  every  small  boy 
will  respond.  I  must  confess  that  it  was  easier  for  me  to  get 
enru«rh  to  eat  during  our  davs  on  the  farm  than  it  was  for  me 
to  get  enough  to  read-  When,  therefore,  one  of  the  visiting 
ministers  persuaded  my  father  to  subscribe  for  a  religious  week- 
ly he  left  a  permanent  memorial  of  his  visit  which  meant  vastly 
more  to  me  than  any  nassing  improvement  of  our  menu  while 
he  was  there.  I  rnncmber  his  name — 1'cncdict — to  this  day.  and 
the  inner  far  which  he  took  mv  father's  subscription — the  Xew 
York  Examiner — was  one  of  the  formative  forces  of  my  youth. 

The  editor  at  that  time,  the  Rev.  Edward  I.right.  IX  D..  was 
an  Englishman  who  had  been  long  resident  in  this  country,  lie 
was  an  editorial  autocrat,  whose  pen  was  commonly  keen  and 
not  always  kind,  but  he  had  something  to  say  and  he  knew  how 
to  siv  it.  His  style  was  worth  more  to  me  than  the  substance 
of  what  he  said.  His  frequent  tilts  with  the  New  York  In  Ic- 
pen-Vnt  over  denominational  affairs  seem  finite  trivial  t  •  me 
new.  but  the  trenchant  way  in  which  he  went  at  it  ap|>ealed  to 


50. 

all  the  partisan  and  the  militant  in  me  then.  The  Examiner  did 
rne  good.  I  am  not  sure  but  that  it  did  me  quite  as  much  harm. 
The  Phariseeism  of  the  religious  press  was  more  pronounced 
thirty-five  years  ago  than  now. 

Fifteen  years  after  I  made  my  first  acquaintance  with  a 
religious  newspaper  I  began  to  write  for  one  myself  in  a  regular 
editorial  way.  It  was  during  my  ministry  in  Salem,  Oregon, 
and  the  paper  for  which  I  wrote  was  born  in  the  parsonage 
where  I  lived-  The  Rev.  J.  C.  Baker,  one  of  my  predecessors 
in  the  pastorate  there,  was  its  founder  and  first  editor.  %  The 
paper  had  changed  its  name,  and  was  published  in  Portland 
when  I  began  my  work  on  the  Pacific  Coast.  There  was  an- 
other Baptist  paper  in  San  Francisco  at  the  time,  and  yet  an- 
other of  much  more  sectarian  emphasis  published  at  Dayton, 
Wash.,  I  think.  They  have  all  passed  except  the  Portland  paper, 
and  that  is  published  in  McMinnville  now. 

A  new  editor  took  charge  of  this  paper  about  the  time  that 
I  went  to  Silem.  He  was  an  Oregon  boy,  of  some  size.  His 
weight  was  above  250  pounds;  he  stood  over  six  feet  tall,  and 
was  one  of  the  best  proportioned  men  physically  whom  I  have 
ever  seen.  Once,  going  along  the  streets  of  Rochester,  N  .Y., 
where  he  had  studied  years  before,  with  his  wife  beside  him, 
they  passed  two  street  urchins  engaged  in  some  game.  One  of 
them  chanced  to  look  up  as  he  passed. 

"Say,  Bill,  look  there."  he  said,  nudging  his  companion, 
"won't  that  fellow  be  a  help  to  his  mother  when  he  gets  growed 
up." 

All  in  all,  he  has  probably  been  the  most  helpful  man  to 
his  denominational  alma  mater  that  our  church  on  the  Pacific 
Coast  has  produced-  He  made  a  good  editor,  although  quite  an 
ordinary  writer.  He  has  had  but  one  pastorate,  and  that  a  small 
one,  and  is  not  a  popular  preacher.  His  strength  is  that  of  a 
counsellor,  and  as  such  he  ought  to  have  sat  in  the  councils  of 
the  nation,  or  at  least  of  the  church  universal,  and  not  to  have 
wasted  his  mental  and  moral  resources  doing  errands  for  de- 
nominational devotees.  One  of  the  chief  sins  of  sectarianism  is 
that  it  uses  draft  animals  to  drive  go-carts,  and  dynamos  of 
unmeasured  power  to  turn  out  toys.  Both  the  nations  and  the 
churches  are  wasting  the  world's  wealth  at  tremendous  rate  in 
keeping  up  standing  armies  which  the  world  has  outgrown. 

I  began  to  write  editorials  in  October,  1891,  and  continued 
until  the  summer  of  1899.  During  this  period  of  nearly  eight 
years  I  did  not  fail  half  a  dozen  times,  I  think,  to  turn  out  my 
weekly  stunt  of  a  full  page.  Besides  these  unsigned  editorials 
I  contributed  a  good  many  pages  of  general  matter  over  my  own 


51. 

name.  I  gave  up  the  work  in  1899  both  because  the  national 
Baptist  anniversaries  were  coming  to  San  Francisco  in  May  of 
that  year,  and  as  missionary  superintendent  for  Northern  and 
Central  California  and  Nevada  I  was  too  much  occupied  with 
preparations  for  that  event,  and  for  the  deeper  reason  that  I 
recognized  I  could  no  longer  write  with  the  freedom  with  which 
I  had  written  before.  I  had  dubbed  the  editorial  page  with  this 
title,  "FROM  OUR  POINT  OF  VIEW."  But  I  was  drawing 
away  from  much  for  which  the  paper  stood,  and  had  to  stand 
to  keep  peace  with  its  constituency,  and  I  did  not  want  to  em- 
barrass those  who  were  responsible  for  its  circulation  with  ut- 
terances which  they  could  not  easily  either  accept  or  refuse. 

During  the  years  that  I  wrote  for  the  paper  I  neither  asked 
nor  expected  any  financial  return.  The  paper  was  not  able  to 
pay.  Its  editor-in-chief,  to  whom  I  have  referred,  and  who 
was  supposed  to  live  by  it,  got  only  $500  or  $600  a  year  out  of 
it.  How  he  managed  to  live  and  raise  a  family  on  the  meager 
and  uncertain  returns  which  he  thus  secured  no  one  but  himself 
and  his  thrifty  wife  knows.  Those  who  starve  to  death  for  the 
sake  of  sectarianism,  whether  in  the  pulpit  or  the  editorial  chair, 
are  not  supposed  to  say  much  about  it.  There  was  a  field  editor 
also  who  had  $600  a  year,  and  who.  through  toilsome  years  of 
service  which  kept  him  continually  traveling  all  over  his  im- 
mense province,  from  San  Diego  to  Seattle  and  east  to  the  east- 
ernmost edges  of  Montana,  managed '  through  labors  really 
worthy  of  an  apostolic  cause  to  force  the  circulation  of  the  little 
paper  up  to  approximately  5000  subscribers.  He  was  an  Irish- 
man, affable,  lovable,  capable,  with  the  best  traits  of  the  race, 
and  as  devoted  to  our  sectarianism  as  any  Catholic  could  have 
been  to  his  church.  The  sacrifices  that  go  into  the  making  of 
religious  newspapers  would  l>e  tragic,  if  they  were  not  so  often 
trivial  in  their  results.  Perhaps  they  are  therefore  more  tragic, 
rather  than  less. 

What  I  have  said  will  make  manifest.  I  hope,  that  the  inci- 
dents which  I  am  about  to  relate,  and  the  judgments  which  I 
pass  on  the  religious  press,  are  neither  the  careless  comments 
of  ignorance,  nor  the  indulgences  of  personal  spite.  There  are 
no  men  with  whom  I  have  worked  toward  whom  I  feel  wanner 
friendship  to  this  rlay,  or  more  of  genuine  personal  regard,  than 
the  men  with  whom  I  was  so  long  and  closely  associated  in 
helping  to  make  the  paper  which  is  now  our  only  denominational 
organ  on  the  Pacific  Coast. 

This  was  one  of  the  humorous,  and  also  pathetic  experi- 
ences of  those  editorial  days. 

I  wrote  an  editorial  of  some  length,  and  of  a  good  deal  of 


52. 

vigor,  dealing  frankly  and  fearlessly  with  patent  medicines.  The 
editor  must  have  heen  very  much  rushed  with  other  mat- 
ters that  week,  or  else  his  sense  of  humor  was  •  resting  up,  for 
in  the  very  same  issue  in  which  my  editorial  appeared  there 
appeared  also  in  the  center  of  the  paper  a  full  two-page 
advertisement  of  "Pink  Pills  for  Pale  People."  It  was  the  most 
conspicuous  thing  in  the  paper  that  week. 

Someone  who  knew  that  I  wrote  the  first  page,  a  doctor,  I 
think,  clipped  out  my  editorials  and  sent  them  to  me,  with  the 
advertisement.  I  could  only  answer  him  with  a  good  humored 
statement  to  the  effect  that  I  was  not  running  the  advertising 
pages.  I  might  have  said  also  that  I  was  not  dependent  upon 
the  paper  for  my  livelihood,  and  that  the  editor  very  probably 
had  no  salary  that  week  except  what  he  got  from  advertising 
pills  whose  proprietors  dealt  with  him  more  generously  and 
justly  than  his  subscribers. 

I  am  not  defending  such  advertising  on  the  part  of  the 
religious  press,  and  I  am  glad  that  most  of  the  denominational 
newspapers  are  carrying  little  of  it  today-  But  they  did  not 
lead  public  sentiment  at  this  point ;  they  followed  it,  and  in  some 
cases  very  reluctantly.  I  blamed  them  more  for  it  then  than  I  do 
now,  because  now  I  see  more  clearly  that  it  was  primarily  an 
economic  question.  Only  we  ought  to  be  frank 'enough  to  rec- 
ognize the  fact  that  religious  people  cannot  be  most  freely  and 
effectively  religious  when  the  pay  envelope  is  in  the  hands  of 
the  enemy. 

A  more  subtle  illustration  of  the  same  fact  came  later.  This 
time  my  editorial  had  to  do  with  a  line  of  thought  which  is  re- 
lated closely  to  the  whole  purpose  of  these  papers  which  I  am 
writing  now.  I  was  trying  to  show  that  an  institution  may  be 
thoroughly  bad  and  yet  the  men  who  stand  for  it  may  be  indi- 
vidually good,  at  least  in  a  personal  way.  I  wrote  substantially 
as  follows:  "Slavery  was  an  abomination,  yet  many  of  those 
who  justified  that  institution  were  sincerely  religious  people, 
kind,  honest,  and  lovable  in  a  personal  way.  Likewise  John  D. 
Rockefeller  may  be  wholly  sincere  in  his  piety,  yet  this  does  by 
no  means  justify  the  institution  of  which  he  is  the  head."  T 
have  no  copy  of  the  editorial  now,  and  it  is  possible  that  I  used 
the  name  also  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company  in  a  more  definite 
way  than  I  have  given  the  quotation  above.  P>ut  this  is,  for  all 
practical  purposes,  the  substance  of  what  I  said. 

Two  things  happened.  When  the  editorial  appeared  Rocke- 
feller's name  had  somehow  been  changed  to  Rothschild.  In  that 
case,  the  types  themselves  must  have  taken  note  of  the  fact  that 
Rockefeller  is  a  Baptist,  and  an  American  Baptist,  on  whom 


53. 

our  American  missionary  societies  were  drawing  heavily  at  the 
lime,  and  that  the  Rothschilds  are  only  Jews,  and  foreigners. 
Besides,  you  see  the  point  of  the  editorial  was  just  as  well  pre- 
served. 

In  spite  of  the  thought  fulness  of  the  types  there  came  to 
me  a  letter  from  a  very  indignant  subscriber.  He  was  a  South- 
erner, resident  in  one  of  our  chief  California  towns,  and  highly 
honored  there  as  a  judge,  and  as  an  honorable  citizen.  Those 
who  knew  him  well  tell  me  that  he  was  personally  a  most  ex- 
cellent man-  He  wrote  to  tell  me  that  he  had  stopped  the  paper, 
as  he  could  not  have  any  such  teaching  in  his  family.  He  de- 
nied seriously  and  earnestly  that  slavery  was  an  abominition, 
defended  the  institution  devoutly,  and.  though  I  wrote  him  in 
a  kindly  way,  with  mental  recognition  of  the  influence  of  his 
earlier  environments,  he  would  make  no  concessions  on  his  side, 
and  could  not  endure  the  idea  that  his  denominational  journal 
might  incline  his  boys  to  such  ideas. 

On  the  sectarian  side,  the  religious  papers  are  quite  puerile. 
The  best  of  them  are  getting  away  from  that  sort  of  thing.  Such 
magazines  as  The  Outlook,  and  such  papers  as  The  Congrega- 
tionalist  are  quite  free  from  religious  partisanship,  and  set  the 
secular  press  a  good  example  of  intellectual  dignity  and  open 
miudedness.  The  majority  of  the  papers  on  which  most  of  the 
more  active  members  of  the  churches  yet  depend  for  direct  re- 
ligious guidance  are  still  to  a  pitiful  degree  mere  echoes  of  sec- 
tarian emphasis.  They  cater  almost  invariably  to  the  conser- 
vatives, and  not  infrequently  are  the  champions  of  the  reac- 
tionaries, for  the  reason  that  their  liberal  subscribers  will  tol- 
erate that  sort  of  thing  with  good-natured  contempt,  while  the 
reactionaries  are  quick  to  resent  with  open  opposition  any  sign 
of  progressiveness  in  the  papers  which  they  support.  Xo  papers 
are  worse  than  the  religious  papers  of  the  ordinary  type,  with 
resj)ect  to  fawning  upon  the  influential  in  their  own  circles. 
They  toady  continually  to  the  ministers  of  the  big  churches,  and 
the  officials  of  the  big  denominational  societies.  They  are 
slower  than  the  yellow  journals  knowingly  to  misrepresent  fact*, 
but  they  are  quite  as  unreliable  in  their  silences,  and  the  coloring 
which  they  give  to  facts.  They  are  blind  partisans  to  their  own 
cause  and  often  most  pharasaically  unfair  in  dealing  with  the 
other  fellow.  The  yellow  journals  themselves  arc  doing  more 
for  the  cause  of  the  common  man  today  than  is  the  religion* 
press,  with  an  honorable  exception  here  and  there.  The  reli- 
gious papers  generally  understand  labor  alxnit  as  well  as  Xico- 
demus  understood  Jesus.  Socially,  they  are  tremendously  in 
need  of  being  born  again. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

AN  EVANGELISTIC  CHURCH. 

In  July  of  1893  I  left  Salem,  very  reluctantly,  and  accepted 
an  unsought  invitation  to  Oakland,  Cal.  The  call  of  California 
to  me  was  more  than  a  matter  of  climate ;  it  was  primarily  the 
promise  of  a  larger  opportunity  in  the  larger  town. 

One  incident  in  connection  with  our  removal  from  Salem  to 
Oakland  is  worth  mentioning,  for  the  light  it  throws  on  our 
present  commercial  methods.  It  cost  us  $19.75  to  remove  our 
household  goods  from  Salem  to  San  Francisco,  a  distance  of 
750  miles.  They  were  loaded  on  the  boat  at  Salem,  went  up 
the  Willamette  river,  were  transferred  to  the  cars  for  the  jour- 
ney overland  to  the  coast  and  then  transferred  to  the  boat  again, 
and  finally  landed  in  San  Francisco  instead  of  on  the  Oakland 
side  of  the  bay.  It  cost  us  an  even  $20  to  get  them  carried 
across  the  bay  to  our  home  in  East  Oakland,  a  distance  of  not 
more  than  ten  miles.  A  letter  at  the  same  proportionate  rate 
would  have  cost  us  two  cents  to  send  it  from  Salem  to  San 
Francisco,,  and  a  dollar  and  a  half  to  send  it  across  the  bay. 

My  first  pastorate  in  Oakland  lasted  four  and  a  half  years. 
It  marked  the  zenith  of  my  ministry,  so  far  as  concerns  those 
conditions  which  are  commonly  counted  success.  I  had  a  suf- 
ficent  salary,  never  large,  but  quite  enough  for  our  moderate 
needs.  My  denominational  standing  was  first  class,  and  I  was 
in  frequent  demand  for  addresses  at  general  religious  gather- 
ings. The  newspapers  paid  very  little  attention  to  me,  but  al- 
ways spoke  of  me  approvingly  when  my  name  appeared.  There 
were  continual  additions  to  the  membership  of  the  church — 230 
in  all — of  which  nearly  one-half  joined  us  by  direct  confes- 
sion of  faith.  We  had  the  largest  Sunday-school  in  East  Oak- 
land at  the  time,  and  my  congregation  often  crowded  the  church 
to  an  uncomfortable  degree.  There  was  unity  among  us,  and  a 
tenderness  of  personal  relations  which  makes  it  hard  for  me 
now  to  speak  as  openly  and  impersonally  as  I  should. 

One  of  the  little  girls  of  my  congregation,  a  precocious 
child,  was  describing  to  me  an  aunt  of  hers  who  had  just  come 
from  Worcester,  Mass-,  and  had  not  yet  attended  upon  our 
services.  To 'the  lively  amazement  of  the  family,  she  wound  up 
her  praises  of  her  pastor  with  this  remark,  said  in  her  demurest 
fashion :  "And,  auntie,  he  is  such  a  godly  man."  Another  lit- 
tle girl,  at  a  somewhat  later  period,  was  standing  at  the  church 
doors  when  I  came  out.  Her  father  pointed  to  me  and  asked 
her: 


"Who  is  that  man,  Irene  ?" 

To  which,  after  a  moment  of  hesitation,  she  answered: 

"That's  the  man  that  goes  wow  wow." 

I  have  often  wondered  of  late  years  which  of  them  de- 
scribed most  accurately  my  first  pastorate  in  Oakland.  There 
is  so  much  of  what  passes  for  spirituality  which  is  little  more 
than  a  repitition  of  a  single  strain  of  sound. 

My  preaching  was  conservative  then,  though  I  made  less  of 
theology  than  I  did  of  the  evangelistic  appeal.  This  was  the 
secret  of  such  success  as  we  had.  I  preached  "the  pure  gospel," 
to  use  a  current  phrase  which  is  as  mischievously  misleading 
as  most  cant  phrases  are,  and  every  Sunday  evening  after  the 
sermon  I  hald  an  inquiry  meeting  in  more  or  less  impromptu 
form. 

There  is  no  point  at  which  the  churches  which  we  call  ortho- 
dox are  stronger,  and  weaker,  than  they  are  at  the  point  of  evan- 
gelism. This  it  is,  even  more  than  their  social  activities  and 
their  family  atmosphere,  which  gives  them  their  hold  upon  their 
members.  Most  of  these  members  have  come  into  the  churches 
under  the  influence  of  evangelistic  appeal,  and  the  sound  of  that 
sort  df  preaching  is  to  them  like  the  music  of  childhood  which 
stirs  up  memories  of  the  tenderest  emotional  type.  The  results 
of  such  preaching  when  it  is  successful  are  immediate  and  ob- 
vious, and,  despite  the  warning  of  Jesus  that  "the  kingdom  of 
heaven  comcth  not  with  observation."  most  of  us  are  impatient 
of  results  which  we  cannot  see.  Evangelism  at  its  l>est  is  at- 
tended by  transformations  of  character  which  are  little  short  of 
miraculous,  and  to  most  people  the  sun  coming  out  from  under 
an  eclipse  is  vastly  more  wonderful  than  the  rising  of  the  sun 
every  day.  There  are  no  people  who  seek  after  a  sign  more 
assiduously  than  the  Pharisees  of  all  generations  do. 

"It's  the  cat  that  catches  the  mice  that  interests  me."  said  a 
minister  in  my  hearing  some  years  ago.  He  was  young,  vigor- 
ous, resourceful,  and  especially  eager  for  results-  He  has  lx?cn 
a  very  successful  ecclesiastical  cat,  if  his  own  figure  is  to  l>e 
allowed. 

I  was  under  the  domination  of  the  same  idea  in  those 
days.  Orthodoxy  appealed  to  me  principally  because  it  got  re- 
sults, a  large  hearing,  an  abundance  of  religious  activity,  and 
a  continuous  supply  of  converts.  -I  was  very  slow  to  see  that 
spiritual  forces  cannot  be  autographed  on  cards  of  any  kind, 
and  that  the  movements  of  ideas  which  work  their  slow  trans- 
formations of  society  are  not  tabulated  on  blacklxiards  or  in 
denominational  reports. 

There  were  some  things  about  my  success  even  then,  how- 


56. 

ever,  which  disturbed  me  a  good  deal.  One  of  the  chief  of 
these  was  the  popularity  of  my  work,  and  all  work  of  that  type 
with  men  toward  whom  I  felt  an  instinctive  and  irrepressible 
distrust. 

They  were  good  enough  men  in  a  personal  way,  too  good 
indeed,  for  their  personal  excellence  blinded  many,  as  it  blinded 
me  at  the  time,  to  the  mischief  of  the  social  methods  and  ideals 
for  which  they  stood. 

One  Sunday  morning  I  preached  a  sermon  against  pay  en- 
tertainments in  church.  It  accorded  exactly  with  the  feelings 
of  the  pious  part  of  my  membership,  such  as  were  satisfied  with 
preaching  and  prayer-meetings  and  felt  no  need  of  getting  to- 
gether for  just  ordinary  "good  times."  and  the  social  converse 
of  the  wellloaded  board.  There  were  others  present  who  made 
no  objection  to'  what  I  said,  chiefly  because  I  said  it  and  because 
they  were  not  quickmat  argument,  who,  after  all,  liked  to  get 
busy  in  the  kitchen  of  the  church,  and  enjoyed  laughing  with 
one  another  across  the  tables  more  than  they  did  analyzing  them- 
selves in  a  semi-public  way  before  a  devotional  meeting.  When 
it  came  to  every  day  living  I  am  not  sure  now  that  the  so-called 
devout  had  any  advtntage  over  those  whom  they  privately  re- 
garded as  less  pious.  On  the  whole,  the  more  normal  men  and 
women  probably  lived  happier  and  more  helpful  lives. 

There  was  present  that  morning  a  man  who  was  not  a 
member  of  our  church  and  who  attended  only  once  in  awhile. 
He  was  a  man  of  large  means,  whose  name  was  well  known  in 
big  business  circles  around  the  bay.  Exceedingly  simple  in  his 
own  personal  tastes  he  was  quite  old-fashioned  also  in  his  ideas 
of  religion,  having  the  conservatism  of  the  south,  from  which  he 
came. 

"T  like  to  see  a  church  have  a  little  religion,"  he  remarked 
one  time  by  way  of  explaining  his  disinclination  to  attend  regu- 
larly upon  the  more  fashionable  church  to  which  his  family  be- 
longed- He  liked  ''spiritual''  preaching,  and  evangelistic  meth- 
ods of  work. 

When  the  sermon  was  over  that  morning,  he  called  to  him 
our  church  treasurer,  and,  with  a  smile,  handed  him  a  check  for 
$100. 

"That's  the  kind  of  doctrine  I  like,"  he  said. 

Another  time,  on  a  Sunday  evening,  we  were  so  crowded 
that  we  had  to  use  the  lower  benches  from  the  Sunday-school 
room  on  which  the  very  little  folks  sat  when  it  was  their  turn 
to  be  taught.  On  one  of  these  sat  that  evening  a  man  whom  T 
instantly  recognized  as  a  large  employer  of  labor,  manager  of 
the  most  unscrupulous  corporation  in  San  Francisco  at  the 
time.  Our  church  treasurer,  who  was  acting  as  usher  also,  of- 
fered him  another  and  a  better  seat,  but,  with  the  bland  smile 


which  was  characteristic  of  him,  he  waived  the  offer  aside  and  in- 
dicated his  pleasure  in  seeing  the  crowded  condition  of  the  church 
for  a  straight  evangelistic  service  by  insisting  upon  sitting  thus 
commonly  among  the  common  folks. 

It  was  the  same  evening,  if  I  mistake  not,  for  he  came  sev- 
eral times,  that  he  invited  me  to  walk  with  him  a  far  as  the  sta- 
tion, where  we  waited  together  till  he  took  the  local  train.  His 
conversation  was  quiet  and  deliberate,  somewhat  critical  in  a 
smiling  way  of  churches  in  general,  but  warmly  commendatory 
of  the  evangelistic  methods  which  we  were  following.  In  a  ten- 
tative way  he  suggested  that  San  Francisco  offered  a  larger 
field,  and  gave  me  to  understand  that  if  I  would  leave  my  Oak- 
land pastorate  and  take  hold  of  mission  work  in  San  1-Yincisco 
he  would  do  what  he  could  to  see  that  I  had  sufficient  financial 
backing.  Tentative  and  cautious  as  the  proposition  was  there 
was  every  reason  to  believe  he  meant  business  and  only  waited 
my  assent  to  get  behind  such  a  movement  in  a  substantial  way. 

I  repected  both  these  men,  but  their  preference  for  my 
procedure  did  not  strengthen  it  in  my  mind.  Even  then  I  took 
Jesus'  sayings  about  wealth  too  seriously  to  believe  that  moral 
vision  is  on  the  side  of  money.  1  had  the  feeling  already  in 
embryo  that  good  work  is  not  going  to  be  everywhere  well  re- 
ceived, and  that  the  favor  of  the  well-to-do  under  ordinary  social 
circumstances  is  not  an  altogether  favorable  sign.  lint  it  was 
not  until  years  afterw.ards  that  I  came  to  understand  why  it  is  % 
that  wealth  looks  with  complacency  upon  church  work  of  the 
"spiritual"  and  evangelistic  type. 

Yet  I  was  beginning  to  wake  up.  T  turned  over  uncasih- 
on  my  own  easy  bed  when  someone  reported  to  me  that  one  rf 
the  members  of  the  church,  an  old  man  of  sober  habits  and 
industrious  life  but  dependent  now  with  his  wife  on  an  over- 
worked and  often  underpaid  young  woman  relative,  had  been 
actually  seen  fumbling  over  a  garbage  barrel  at  a  neighboring 
store,  kept  by  another  of  my  members,  in  the  effort  to  pick  out 
some  pieces  of  unspoiled  fruit  to  take  home. 

I  think  mv  preaching  was  still  evangelistic  the  next  Snndav 
night.  Both  the  church  and  the  pastor  were  so  set  on  "saving 
souls"  that  we  had  no  time  to  develop  a  saving  social  sen«e  just 
then.  If  the  matter  was  mentioned  among  us  we  agreed  that  the 
misfortune  was  individual  and  unnecessary  It  was  too  Knd.  of 
course,  but  what  man  needed  was  to  "accent  Christ.''  \Yhat  I 
didn't  see  then  was  that  the  church  itself  had  no  idea  of  what  the 
accepting  of  Christ  actually  involved,  and  if  the  proposition  had 
been  presented  to  them  in  all  its  breadth  they  would  have  shrunk 
from  it  with  quicker  repugnance  than  that  excited  bv  the  gar- 
bage barrel.  They  were  content  with  evangelism,  and  I  was  con- 
tent with  evangelism,  though  neither  of  us  knew  it.  because 
evangelism  is  one  of  the  easiest  ways  in  the  world  of  exciting 


58. 

moods  of  "spiritual"  self-satisfaction  in  your  own  mind  and 
making  an  appearance  of  helping  the  other  fellow  without  hurt- 
ing yourself.  Doubtless  it  has  its  place,  and  I  still  believe  in 
the  evangelistic  mind  when  the  terms  are  taken  in  their  deepest 
sense.  But  much  of  that  which  passes  for  evangelism  now  is 
the  substitution  of  playing  with  theology  while  we  work  be- 
tween times  at  all  sorts  of  social  injustice  between  man  and  man. 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

THE  TURN*  OF  THE  ROAD. 

It  was  during  my  first  pastorate  in  Oakland  that  the  Rev. 
George  D.  Hcrron  gave  a  series  of  lectures  in  that  city  in  the 
large  auditorium  cf  the  First  Congregational  Church.  The 
audiences  were  the  largest  and  most  representative  I  have  ever 
seen  for  lecturing  of  that  kind  in  a  Christian  church. 

Hcrrrm  was  then  in  good  standing  with  the  churches,  al- 
though reckoned  by  many  a  dangerous  radical.  Years  after- 
wards, sitting  with  one  of  the  leaders  of  New  England  religious 
life  at  a  dinner  table  in  Boston,  ho  said  to  me  when  George  D. 
Herron  was  named: 

"I  sincerely  hoped  for  awhile  that  Herron  was  to  be  the 
prophet  of  our  generation." 

Herron  divorced  his  wife  and  married  another  woman.  T 
do  not  know  the  merits  of  the  controversy  which  raged  over 
the  matter.  The  minister  who  performed  the  second  ceremony 
told  me  in  confidence  of  conditions  which,  if  exactlv  stated,  must 
hive  very  much  modified  the  condemnation  of  Herron  among 
religious  people  had  the  facts  been  generally  known.  This  was 
long  after  I  hearo  Herron  in  Oakland,  of  course,  and  on  the 
same  journey  during  which  T  dined  with  the  Boston  clergyman 
who  voiced  what  had  been  undoubtedly  the  earnest  expectation 
of  many  religious  people- 

Herron 's  standing  with  religious  people  was  never  better 
than  it  was  when  he  made  his  visit  to  Oakland.  Very  few  of 
tin  se  who  heard  him  there,  however,  accepted  his  message.  I 
was  one  of  those  who  almost  contemptuously  set  his  sayings 
aside. 

I  remember  asking  him  in  one  of  the  question  periods  which 
followed  his  lectures,  with  callow  confidence  in  the  profoundness 
of  my  own  philosophy: 

"How  can  you  make  a  perfect  society  out  of  imperfect  men 
an  1  women?" 

Herron  treated  the  question  with  the  indifference  which  it 
deserved.  It  would  have  been  just  as  sensible  to  have  asked 
Abraham  Lincoln  when  Tie  was  about  to  sign  the  Emancipation 
Proclnmation' : 

"How  do  you  propose  to  set  men  free  outside.  Mr.  Kincoln. 
who  are  not  free  inside'?" 

The  blacks  are  not  all  free  since  Lincoln  freed  them,  but 
th<>v  are  at  leist  delivered  from  the  huge  injustice  of  that  par- 
ticular bondage  by  which  the  white  man  exploited  their  bodies 


60. 

at  the  same  time  that  he  evangelized  their  souls.  And  the 
churches  were  pitifully  slow  to  see  that  teaching  negroes  to  sing, 
"I'm  Glad  Salvation's  Free,"  was  no  justification  before  the  eyes 
of  an  all-merciful  Father  for  forcing  them  to  kneel  in  bondage 
before  the  juggernaut  of  the  white  man's  dividends.  Every 
taskmaster  in  Christendom  who  grinds  the  faces  of  the  poor 
would  have  approved  the  question  which  T  asked  that  night. 
They  are  all  willing  to  wait  to  see  men  individually  converted 
if  you  will  let  alone  the  social  injustice  out  of  which  they  exploit 
their  fellows. 

It  was  the  reading  of  a  book  which  first  seriously  disturbed 
my  shallow  philosophy.  The  book  was  one  that  had  been  writ- 
ten many  years  before.  It  had  been  my  father's  in  his  later  life, 
and  he  had  passed  it  on  to  me  almost  as  soon  as  he  had  read 
it  himself.  To  him  it  was  a  gospel  which  warmed  with  its 
glow  the  sunset  of  his  personal  fortunes,  and  gave  him  hopes  of 
a  bright  morning  for  the  world  when  his  own  night  was  drawing 
near. 

I  do  not  know  ho\v  it  was  I  had  failed  to  read  it  before,  for 
it  had  been  on  the  shelves  of  my  library  before  I  went  to  Mex- 
ico. Ministers  spend  so  much  time  in  intellectual  mumbling 
over  ancient  texts,  and  are  so  tied  up  to  scribal  scrutini/dngs  of 
dead  languages,  dead  laws,  and  the  literature  of  dead  peoples 
that  many  of  them  find  little  opportunity  to  give  serious  heed 
to  the  great  prophetic  messages  of  the  age  in  which  they  live. 
Most  of  our  sermonizings  are  built  on  the  model  of  the  scribes 
who  rejected  Jesus,  much  more  than  they  are  on  Jesus'  method 
of  talking  about  nature  as  he  saw  it  and  life  as  he  found  it  every 
day. 

It  was  when  I  had  ceased  the  weekly  preparation  of  two 
sermons  for  each  following  Sunday  that  I  came  to  the  reading 
which  revolutionized  my  way  of  approaching  truth  and  under- 
standing life-  The  men  who  called  me  away  from  my  Oakland 
church  to  go  out  and  minister  among  the  churches  at  large  had 
in  mind  for  me  a  kind  of  bishop's  office,  overlooking  the  smaller 
congregations  especially  and  promoting  new  congregations  of 
our  sect  in  whatever  portions  of  the  State  there  was  apparent 
need  and  opportunity.  I  visited  the  larger  churches  to  collect 
missionary  funds,  and.  with  the  co-operation  of  our  "State  Con- 
vention Board"  I  supervised  the  expenditure  of  these  funds 
and  the  missionary  moneys  which  we  received  from  the  East. 
At  that  time  the  denomination  in  the  East  gave  us  two  dollars 
for  every  dollar  which  we  raised  ourselves. 

Most  of  my  work,  therefore,  was  raising  money,  as  even 
the  churches  which  were  helped  were  expected  to  help  the  board 


61. 

in  return.  I  could  use  the  same  sermon  over  and  over  again, 
as  I  had  more  than  one  hundred  and  thirty  churches  to  visit. 
To  a  man  who  is  intellectually  lazy,  that  sort  of  a  bishop's  office 
may  mean  mental  somnolence  under  the  guise  of  administrative 
activity.  Even  the  travel  and  the  broader  contact  with  men  does 
not  always  compensate  for  the  monotony  of  one's  message  and 
the  habit  of  dealing  either  with  dependents  on  the  one  hand  or 
with  donors  on  the  other.  Men  of  affairs,  whether  those  af- 
fairs are  commercial  or  ecclesiastical,  are  seldom  progressive 
unless  they  use  their  intellectual  leisure  for  much  reading. 

Fortunatey  for  me  I  read,  and  read  omniverously,  when  I 
wras  set  free  from  the  pressure  of  immediate  pulpit  preparation. 
One  of  the  first  books  which  I  read,  whose  title  I  have  thus  far 
withheld,  was  "Progress  and  Poverty,"  by  Henry  George.  1  fol- 
lowed it  with  "Equality,"  by  Edward  Bellamy,  and  "Socialism 
and  Social  Reform,"  by  Prof.  Richard  T.  Ely  of  the  Univer- 
sity of  Wisconsin  then  for  some  years.  These  were  but  intro- 
ductory volumes,  but  they  impressed  me  more  definitely  than 
any  other  half  dozen  which  followed. 

Only  one  of  these  .books  is  written  from  the  Socialist  point 
of  view,  "Equality,"  and  that  belongs  rather  to  "Nationalism*1 
than  to  the  larger  industrial  revolutionism  of  our  time.  Both 
Henry  George  and  Richard  T.  Ely  are  critics  of  the  Socialist 
philosophy.  Yet  their  concessions,  and  their  criticisms  of  the 
present  order,  did  more  to  make  me  a  Socialist  than  the  direct 
advocacy  of  the  Socialists  themselves. 

Two  things  I  recognized  then  which  are  at  the  bottom  of 
my  thinking  today-  One  is  the  law  of  evolution  covering  the 
whole  field  of  life.  The  other  is  the  influence  of  economic  en- 
vironment in  determining  the  directions  in  which  men  have 
moved. 

It  was  during  the  days  of  my  missionary  superintendence 
and  while  I  was  still  resident  in  Oakland  that  I  joined  the  Rus- 
kin  Club.  This  was  a  group  of  Socialist  "intellectuals."  includ- 
ing a  fair  pro|>ortion  of  1x>th  professional  and  business  men, 
with  a  very  few  of  those  who  are  commonly  dubbed  working- 
men.  It  was  not  the  least  snobbish,  however,  and  its  point  of 
view  was  emphatically  that  of  the  working  class. 

The  largest  service  of  the  Ruskin  Club  to  me  was  that  I 
met  there  men  who  had  neither  any  deference  nor  any  anlip- 
pathy  toward  the  ministry.  They  were  more  consistent  than 
most  Socialists  in  that  they  recognized  with  perfect  courtesy  the 
economic  environment  of  the  minister,  and  neither  blamed  him 
nor  excused  him  for  it.  but  tried  to  understand  him  just  where 
he  stood.  At  the  same  time  their  intellectual  size  made  the 


62. 

small  "tatting  work"  of  the  ministry  look  like  the  light  work 
that  it  is  for  a  real  man. 

Once,  years  later,  when  I  was  pastor  again  in  Oakland  of 
the  same  church  which  I  had  served  before,  I  preached  one 
night  on  baptism.  It  was  a  Statement  in  dispassionate  form  of 
the  ritualistic  contentions  of  my  people,  and  I  know  now  that 
I  had  not  very  much  heart  in  it.  Quite  unexpectedly,  a  group 
of  the  "Ruskin"  men  were  there.  They  listened  with  perfect 
courtesy,  and  made  no  sign  of  dissent  from  anything  I  said. 
But  I  felt,  and  am  not  ashamed  to  admit  it  now.  as  if  I  had 
been  caught  playing  with  dolls. 

Twice  within  a  period  of  three  years  I  visited  Southern 
California.  The  first  time  was  whil^  I  was  yet  in  my  first  Oak- 
land pastorate.  I  went  by  special  invitation  to  the  meeting  of 
the  "Southern  California  Convention"  at  San  Diego,  and  gave 
one  of  the  addresses.  I  said  nothing  in  particular,  rnd  it  was 
very  cordially  received- 

My  second  visit  was  made  when  I  was  missionary  super- 
intendent. I  was 'one  of  the  special  speakers  at  the  first  meet- 
ings of  the  "Assembly"  at  Long  Beach. 

"We  want  a  real  message,"  said  the  young  minister  who 
wrote  me.  "Give  us  something  on  the  social  line,  and  give  it  to 
us  straight  from  the  shoulder." 

I  wondered,  and  went. 

My  message  was  on  "The  Unrighteousness  of  Our  Present 
Social  Order."  I  did  not  mention  Socialism.  I  argued  quietly 
and  smilingly  for  an  hour  these  four  propositions:  (1)  Any 
order  of  society  is  wrong  which  allows  the  private  appropriate  M 
of  public  property.  This  was  an  argument  for  the  common  o  \ 
ership  of  natural  resources.  (2)  Any  order  of  society  is  wrong 
which  allows  the  strong  to  appropriate  the  earnings  of  the  weak. 
This  was  an  exposition,  shall  I  say  an  expose,  of  our  waj;c  sys- 
tem. (3)  Any  order  of  society  is  wrong  which  crm^els  men 
to  compete  for  the  necessaries  of  life.  This  dealt  frankly  with 
the  waste  and  woefulness  of  the  "battle  for  bread."  (4)  Any 
order  of  society  is  wrong  which  puts  the  emphasis  of  human 
endeavor  on  the  material  side  of  life.  This  was  an  exhibit  of 
the  inevitable  materialism  of  our  present  order,  and  a  plea  for 
that  order  and  decency  which  would  give  opportunity  for  a  really 
spiritual  social  life. 

The  address  closed  the  doors  of  practically*  every  Baptist 
church  in  Southern  California  to  me  and  left  me  anathema  south 
of  the  Tehachapi  to  this  day.  Yet  our  Baptist  fathers  were  the 
revolutionaries  of  the  revolutionaries  in  their  day,  and  died  for 
no  ritualistic  form  but  for  a  larger  and  finer  freedom  of  faith- 


63. 

So  does  every  sect,  born  of  a  religiously  revolutionary  passion, 
forget  the  big  human  logic  of  its  birth  in  the  worship  of  some 
subsequent  and  incidental  letter  of  its  creed. 

"I  know  the  ministers  who  are  reading,"  said  the  foremost 
book-seller  in  San  1'rancisco  to  me  about  that  time.  "I  know 
the  men  who  are  reading,"  he  repeated,  "and  it  is  the  men  who 
are  not  reading  who  are  conservative." 

The  meaning  of  this  also  the  literalists  will  miss.  It  might 
have  been  said  better,  perchance.  It  is  not  just  the  men  who 
are  not  reading  who  are  not  progressing.  It  is  rather  the  men 
who  are  satisfied  with  their  reading,  and  who  want  to  read  noth- 
ing else.  It  is  the  men  whose  intellectual  "good"  which  they 
learned  years  ago  has  bred  in  them  a  satisfaction  which  prevents 
them  from  going  on -to  something  better. 

Socialism  did  more  for  me  than  to  give  me  a  new  creed ;  it 
humanized  all  my  thinking.  It  humanized  the  origins  of  all  the 
creeds,  and  all  the  churches,  and  gave  me  with  liberty  against  the 
letter  of  any  of  them  a  larger  sympathy  with  the  fundamental  life 
which  is  working  itself  out  through  all  of  them.  It  did  not  make 
me  a  new  partisan :  that  I  have  always  refused  to  be,  even  when 
I  have  worked  with  the  Socialist  party.  I  am  still  a  Socialist 
more  after  the  manner  of  the  Ruskin  Club  than  after  the  iron- 
clad political  Calvinism  of  any  dogmatic  local.  Socialists,  like 
other  people,  are  continually  tumbling  over  their  own  virtues. 
Their  "good"  is  more  dangerous  to  them  than  their  bad.  The 
trouble  is  not  so  much  with  any  of  our  labels  as  it  is  with  our 
exclusiveness  toward  all  labels  except  our  own.  This  is  the  mis- 
chief of  our  good,  whether  it  is  intellectual  or  moral,  that  it  will 
not  let  us  see  how  much  more  good,  and  yet  more  good,  there 
lies  beyond  . 


CHAPTER  XV. 

THE  RELIGION  OF  A  COLLEGE  TOWN- 

It  is  told  of  the  famous  Dutch  scholar,  Hugo  Grothus,  thai, 
when  a  friend  admired  his  great  industry,  he  replied.  "Ah,  I 
have  consumed  much  of  my  life  in  laboriously  doing  nothing." 

One  of  the  heavy  tasks  of  my  missionary  superintendency 
was  the  raising  of  a  lot  of  money  from  a  lot  of  poor  people 
for  a  quite  unnecessary  new  church  building  at  Palo  Alto.  When 
I  closed  my  work  as  missionary  superintendent,  to  my  own  sur- 
prise I  became  pastor  of  the  Palo  Alto  congregation. 

My  Palo  Alto  pastorate  lasted  only  one  year.  I  had  been 
there  but  four  months  when  my  wife  passed  on  beyond  the  great 
silence.  My  life  that  year  was  further  broken  by  three  other 
deaths  within  the  same  family  circle.  The  kindness  of  the 
whole  Palo  Alto  community  to  me  in  that  crisis  I  can  never 
forget. 

Before  my  wife's  death  my  ministry  was  already  dis- 
turbed. I  went  to  Palo  Alto  with  the  purpose  to  try  out  some 
new  methods  of  church  work  and  a  freer  type  of  pulpit  teaching. 
There  seemed  to  me  even  at  that  time  slight  justification  for  any 
enlargement  of  mere  sectarian  expenditure  in  Palo  Alto,  or  any 
like  place,  unless  the  newcomer  contributed  some  distinctive  serv- 
ice of  real  consequence  to  the  Christian  cause.  We  tried,  there- 
fore, a  combination  of  the  Sunday-school  and  the  morning. wor- 
ship, and  I  spoke  at  all  times  from  the  pulpit  with  regard  to  mak- 
ing the  most  in  a  careful  way  of  the  new  liberty  which  had  come 
to  my  own  life. 

The  new  methods  were  accepted  without  complaint.  The 
new  message,  although  more  moderated  to  the  people  than  the 
changed  order  of  work  and  worship,  provoked  instant  protest 
which  even  the  after  tenderness  of  our  tears  together  could  not 
overcome. 

I  found  two  distinct  attitudes  in  Palo  Alto  toward  the  uni- 
versity and  the  whole  modern  mood  of  mind  for  which  it  stood. 
There  were  a  few  who  frankly  rejoiced  in  it,  and  would  have  had 
the  churches  rise  to  their  intellectual  opportunity  and  enter  into 
the  new  Canaan  of  broader  religious  conceptions.  The  majority 
in  the  orthodox  churches,  however,  were  decidedly  conservative, 
and  many  regarded  the  students  in  the  university  as  in  very  seri- 
out  peril  of  going  far  astray  from  the  safe  confines  of  their  child- 
hood's faith.  For  one  class,  the  smaller  class  by  far,  the  function 
of  the  Palo  Alto  churches  of  all  denominations  was  the  readjust- 
ment of  faith  among  their  followers  to  the  terms  of  modern 


65. 

thought-  To  the  other  class,  the  older  people  especially,  and 
those  who  had  never  been  intellectually  young,  the  students  were 
brands  to  be  plucked  from  the  burning. 

The  conservatives  were  responsible  in  the  first  place  for  the 
building  of  so  many  sectarian  churches  in  Palo  Alto,  and  it  is 
the  conservatives  there  and  everywhere  else  who  are  responsible 
for  the  continued  waste  of  sectarianism  today.  The  tragedy  of 
it  is  that  the  worship  of  the  letter  is  always  at  the  ultimate  cost  of 
the  big  human  values  of  life. 

One  Sunday  morning,  talking  about  the  Genesis  stories,  I 
used  this  illustration :  I  held  a  five-dollar  goldpiece  in  my  hand, 
and  said :  "This  is  not  pure  gold ;  there  is  some  alloy  in  it.  But 
it  is  better  for  the  purposes  of  circulation  that  it  is  so :  and.  inas- 
much as  the  coin  has  the  stamp  of  the  Government  upon  it  we 
accept  it  readily  as  legal  tender." 

"Likewise,"  I  continued,  "these  old  Genesis  stories  are  not 
pure  fact.  There  is  doubtless  some  alloy  of  tradition  here.  Hut 
the  stamp  of  a  divine  revelation  is  upon  them  and  they  are  all 
the  better  for  purposes  of  circulation  because  of  the  simple  story 
elements  which  are  there." 

This  careful  and  really  conservative  illustration  brought 
me  a  letter  from  one  of  the  chief  officers  of  my  church  denounc- 
ing me  for  destroying  the  Bible  and  withdrawing  his  own  sup- 
port. He  was  a  good  man,  whose  goodness  made  his  mistaken- 
ness  of  mind  more  mischievous  for  him. 

Tn  place  of  the  morning  doxologv.  which  T  do  not  remember 
to  have  found  in  any  version  of  the  Bible,  we  adopted  the  custom 
of  singing  at  the  opening  of  the  service  one  of  the  old  songs  of 
the  church  universal.  That  which  we  used  most  commonly  was 
"\earer.  My  God,  to  Thee."  One  winter  afternoon  I  remember 
that  my  wife  sat  apart  in  a  cold  room  that  I  might  have  privacy 
for  an  hour  with  an  old  lady  who  Ijad  especially  asked  for  a  pri- 
vate interview.  She  was  from  Boston,  and  the  family  had  pro- 
fessional connections.  In  careful  language  and  in  kindly  tones, 
and  with  the  express  disclaimer  of  the  desire  to  trouble  me.  she 
lnl>orcd  with  me  at  great  length,  nevertheless,  to  prove  to  me  the 
peril  of  our  young  people  through  the  qse  of  that  hymn.  The 
sum  of  its  offending  was  that  "Xearer  My  God  to  Thee"  was 
written  by  a  Unitarian. 

Another  woman,  one  of  the  best  of  my  congregation,  still  in 
the  prime  of  life  and  long  active  in  Christian  service,  confessed 
to  me  that  she  had  lain  awake  worrying  all  night  because  I  had 
ventured  to  suggest  that  the  story  of  David  and  Goliath  was  an 
illustration  of  the  tendency  of  hero  stories  to  gather  around  some 
central  heroic  character.  There  is  another  text  than  that  which 


>       66. 

is  commonly  received  in  which  the  exploit  of  killing  Goliath  seems 
to  be  attributed  to  one  of  David's  men. 

These  were  all  good  people,  but  they  did  not  want  the  truth 
except  as  it  harmonized  with  their  traditions.  It  is  the  good  peo- 
ple of  the  world  who  keep  most  of  its  lies  alive.  And  so  long  as 
molehills  of  ritual  and  dogma  are  larger  in  the  eyes  of  the  reli- 
gious than  are  mountains  of  human  helpfulness  the  stupidness  of 
our  sectarianism  will  go  on. 

There  were  few  ministerial  students  in  Stanford  that  year, 
but  there  were  men  among  the  brightest  and  best  in  the  university 
who  had  been  headed  for  the  ministry  and  had  turned  aside  be- 
cause they  could  not  stomach  that  sort  of  thing.  More  serious 
yet  was  the  fact  that  a  much  larger  number  of  the  best  men  in 
the  great  school  refused  to  take  religion  seriously  for  the  ordi- 
nary work  of  the  world  to  which  they  were  going,  because  the 
"good"  people  whom  they  knew  were  in  a  really  human  way  so 
little  worth  while, 

And  yet  the  ministers  in  Palo  Alto  that  year  were  a  fine  lot 
of  fellows.  Most  of  them  would  have  been  glad  to  be  less  sec- 
tarian if  the  denominational  machine  behind  them  would  have  al- 
lowed them  to  be  so.  They  did  a  lot  of  real  work  in  spite  of  the 
unreality  of  the  paltry  contentions  for  which  their  distinctive 
boundary  lines  stood.  The  churches  that  employed  them  did  not 
realize  fifty  per  cent  on  their  actual  values  because  they  would  not 
suffer  them  to  be  free. 

The  church  in  Salem  brought  me  more  or  less  into  contact 
with  the  Methodist  school  there  known  as  Willamette  University. 
My  church  in  Oakland  was  closely  related  to  our  own  Baptist 
college.  The  year  in  Palo  Alto  was  followed  not  long  afterward 
by  a  year  which  I  spent  as  a  member  of  the  faculty  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  Nevada  at  Reno.  I  think  I  may  claim,  therefore,  to 
know  a  little  about  the  atmosphere  both  of  the  big  schools  and 
of  the  ordinary  college  town. 

There  is  much  about  such  an  atmosphere  of  a  tonic  quality, 
and  it  has  a  peculiar  delightsomeness  of  its  own.  The  presence 
of  so  many  young  people  is  stimulating  in  itself,  and  the  mood  of 
inquiry,  however,  "cabined,  cribbed  and  confined"  by  conventions 
of  one  sort  and  another  is  a  mood  which  makes  for  enlargement 
of  life.  On  the  social  side  also  the  schools  have  much  that  is  at- 
tractive to  ofter. 

Yet  nowhere  have  I  felt  the  limitations  of  goodness  more 
than  I  have  in  centers  of  supposedly  intellectual  life-  Nowhere 
is  there  less  understanding  of  the  common  man.  If  the  churches 
sacrifice  the  human  to  their  creeds,  the  schools  sacrifice  the  hu- 
man to  their  "culture."  The  theological  conservatism  of  the  one 


67. 

is  offset  by  the  sociological  conservatism  of  the  other.  The  pro- 
fessor's chair  is  freer  than  the  pulpit  concerning  the  things  for 
which  sectarianism  cares,  but  the  pulpit  is  freer  than  the  pro- 
fessor's chair  concerning  the  things  for  which  capitalism  cares. 
In  neither  case  is  there  the  freedom  that  there  ought  to  be,  and 
in  both  instances  there  is  lack  of  the  rich  red  blood  of  life.  Both 
pulpit  and  professor's  chair  represent  a  goodness  which  is  enemic 
in  the  presence  of  the  bigegst  issues  of  the  hour. 

Neither  our  schools  nor  our  sch<x~>l  towns  are  really  demo- 
cratic. They  do  not  know  the  feel  of  the  pulse  of  the  poor.  There 
are  exceptions,  of  course,  in  an  individual  way — splendid  excep- 
tions— and  from  these  come  the  most  formidable  leaders  of  revolt. 
But  they  are  outcasts  among  their  own  class.  Generally  speaking 
revolutions  come  from  the  bottom  upwards,  and  the  bulk  of  intel- 
lectual influence  is  one  the  side  of  social  injustice  and  customary 
wrong.  The  scholars  of  his  day  did  not  follow  Jesus  as  a  rule, 
and  there  is  grave  reason  to  suspect  that  the  one  or  two  who  did 
had  much  to  do  with  turning  Christianity  aside. 

No  goodness  is  harder  to  thoroughly  save  than  the  goodness 
of  the  college  town.  It  is  clean,  nice-s]X)ken,  courteous,  well- 
dressed  and  Laodicean  through  and  through.  Lukewarmness  is 
the  favorite  pose  of  culture.  The  "passion  for  men"  is  not  a 
product  of  polite  society.  It  was  Henry  George,  not  a  college 
man,  who  voiced  the  most  memorable  expression  of  the  deepest 
devotion  of  our  age,  "I  am  for  men-"  And  it  was  Dwight  L. 
Moody,  free  from  the  formalism  of  the  schools,  who  broke  with 
his  mighty  enthusiasm  the  wine-skins  of  conventional  religion  a 
generation  ago. 

Palo  Alto  has  suffered  less  than  ordinary  from  the  cnc*Mi  < 
of  culture  by  reason  of  the  big  humaneness  of  the  man  who  has 
led  its  university.  He  is  a  California  monolith  whose  rock  sub- 
stance is  tender  as  a  child's  flesh,  and  whose  veins  are  warm  with 
a  genuine  flow  of  life.  He  will  be  remembered  less  fo'*  li:-<  schol- 
arship tomorrow  than  for  the  part  which  he  has  played  in  pro- 
moting the  cause  of  the  common  man.  If  the  university  were  as 
forwardly  human  as  he  is.  there  would  be  a  stronger  stirring  of 
"the  wind  before  the  dawn"  through  all  the  broad  reaches  of  our 
fairly  human  state.  There  is  a  vast  amount  of  goodness  in  our 
schools  which  it  is  impossible  yet  to  call  really  good. 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

A  COME-OUTER  IN  SAN  FRANCISSO. 

The  majority  of  the  church  in  Palo  Alto  would  have  had  me 
remain  when  my  year  was  done,  and  there  was  na  open  opposition 
to  me  in  a  local  way.  But  because  the  church  property  had  been 
built  largely  by  moneys  contributed  in  a  special  way  by  churches 
all  over  the  State,  and  because  I  was  myself  maintained  while 
there,  in  part,  by  a  special  denominational  appropriation,  I  did 
not  feel  as  free  as  I  would  have  in  the  case  of  a  self-supporting 
church,  ttesides,  I  was  weary  of  sectarianism  and  wanted  to  try 
some  work  outside  of  the  lines.  So  I  joined  a  few  of  my  own 
mood  in  the  effort  to  establish  an  independent  work  in  San  Fran- 
cisco. 

We  called  ourselves  "Christian  Comrades."  There  was  no 
creed  among  us.  and  no  church  organization.  We  kept  our  mem- 
bership individually  wherever  it  happened  to  be  and  advised  those 
who  came  to  us  to  do  the  same.  It  was  not  another  denomina- 
tion which  we  sought.  Of  that  we  were,  if  anything,  too  much 
afraid.  All  that  we  wanted  was  a  chance  to  give  in  San  Fran- 
cisco a  free  Christian  message  in  the  most  untrammeled  way. 

Our  experience  in  a  financial  way  reminds  me  now  of  the 
story  of  the  man  who  remarked  to  a  friend: 

"You  see  that  man  over  there?  Well,  twenty  years  ago  he 
began  business  in  this  town  with  nothing  but  a  borrowed  basket." 

"And  now?"  inquired  the  friend  expectantly. 

"He  still  owes  for  the  basket,"  was  the  laconic  replv. 

We  owed  nothing  when  we  got  through  in  San  Francisco, 
because  we  did  not  borrow,  but  we  never  got  beyond  the  basket 
with  which  we  began. 

Our  intention  was  to  support  ourselves  with  our  hands  and 
spend  all  our  spare  time  in  an  unpaid  ministry.  There  wasn't 
any  spare  time  for  most  of  us.  And  even  then  to  make  a  living 
those  of  our  company  who  had  families  to  support  had  to  get  out 
of  town.  We  had  no  capital  of  our  own,  and  we  were  deter- 
mined that  we  would  not  ask  favors  of  those  who  had,  lest  we 
limit  the  liberty  of  our  social  message.  The  experiment  lasted 
three  months  and  then  we  were  starved  out. 

Part  of  mv  Sundays  I  spent  in  going  about  and  making  a 
studv  of  the  other  come-outers  in  the  town.  It  was  not  a  very 
inspiring  experience.  Generallv  speaking,  the  meetings  were 
small  and  were  a  little  more  lifeless  than  the  churches.  I  wound 
up  on  Palm  Sunday  by  attending  the  services  at  St.  Luke's  Epis- 
copal church.  T  thoroughly  enjoyed  it.  Ritual  commonly  is  too 


69. 

luxurious  for  my  temperament.    But  I  felt  like  <.  ne  who  has  been 
out  all  day  for  a  cold  drive  and  I  wanted  a  warm  room. 

Nothing  is  more  mistaken  than  the  notion  that  truth  is  the 
mere  denial  of  that  which  is  false,  or  that  gcxnl  consists^n  a  sim- 
ple abstinence  from  that  which  is  bad.  Both  truth  and  goodness 
are  vital  and  never  merely  of  a  negative  character.  If  there  is 
any  choice  between  them  I  think  the  Sadducees,  those  who  simply 
deny  superstitions,  are  a  little  less  to  be  desired  than  the  Phari- 
sees who  are  at  least  warm-blooded  enough  to  want  to  affirm 
something.  The  Lord  deliver  us  from  a  steady  diet  of  negatives. 

It  is  odd,  too,  how  easily  men  can  mistake  their  perception 
of  the  failure  of  other  people's  good'^ss  for  the  growth  of  good- 
ness in  themselves.  None  are  so  useless  as  those  who  only  know 
how  useless  other  people  are. 

We  failed  because  we  would  neither  fawn  nor  frrht.  We  did 
not  propose  to  toady  to  San  Fraud  ^"^'s  money,  and  we  were  not 
there  to  increase  misunderstanding  and  ill  will.  The  churches 
would  not  let  us  speak  unless  we  spoke  their  shiblx>leths.  and 
those  who  curiously  came  to  hear  us  did  not  care  to  come  again 
unless  we  would  blow  up  and  burn  up  shibboleths  for  them  all 
the  time.  I  could  have  found  a  platform  had  I  l>een  willing  to 
give  the  social  message  alone,  but  I  wanted  to  give  the  religious 
message  too. 

There  is  more  to  that  last  remark  than  appears.  Most  men 
wrho  are  saying  good  things  in  public  are  saying  them  with  a  tacit 
agreement  not  to  say  a  lot  of  other  good  things.  They  may  not 
be  conscious  of  the  agreement,  or  they  may  deny  it,  but  it  i^ 
there.  Give  the  religious  message,  even  in  a  "liberal"  pulpit,  ar  1 
you  must  muzzle  most  of  the  social  message  which  needs  to  be 
said.  The  theological  liberals  are  a  well-fed  lot.  and  they  IK  1  I  a 
good  share  of  the  box  seats  when  the  pie  is  going  around.  You 
can  say  a  lot  of  good  things  to  them  theologically,  but  yt  u  have  to 
be  "good"  in  a  much  more  submissive  way  when  you  would  talk 
downright  democracy  to  them.  If  "Silence  and  Health"  con- 
tained as  much  radical  sociology  as  it  does  radical  psyschology 
half  the  Christian  Science  churches  would  be  empty  next  week. 

But  before  the  social  radicals  applaud  this  at  the  expense  of 
the  theological  progressives  let  me  say  with  equal  candor  that 
they  also  put  the  mouthpiece  between  the  teeth  of  their  talkers. 
Many  of  them  will  prate  of  the  narrowness  of  the  churches  who 
cannot  l>car  to  have  a  man  utter  a  word  of  his  honot  religious 
convictions  on  one  of  their  platforms,  though  it  be  said  with  not 
the  slightest  desire  to  force  another  man's  thought.  When  they 
are  supposed  to  be  talking  economics  they  will  themselves  drag 
in  philosophic  materialism  by  the  hour.  Let  another  man  em- 


70. 

phasize  the  spiritual  in  the  broadest  fashion,  and,  though  he  may 
have  left  all  to  follow  economic  righteousness  itself  they  will 
sneer  at 'him  as  a  "come-to-Jesus"  deceiver  of  the  people.  There 
are  none  who  need  more  to  make  way  for  other  people's  good  than 
those  who  are  sure  that  they  have  got  a  monopoly  on  the  latest 
brand  themselves. 

P»ad  people  can  make  way  for  other  kinds  of  badness.  It  is 
good  people  who  find  it  hard  to  believe  in  any  goodness,  either 
intellectual  or  moral,  except  their  own.  I  have  found  only  one  or 
two  platforms  yet  where  I  can  say  all  my  message  with  all  my 
heart.  Such  a  platform,  however  obscure,  is  worth  a  fortune  a 
week. 

My  most  interesting  ministry  during  those  months  in  San 
Francisco  was  with  one  man,  and  he  a  prisoner. 

He  was  a  boyish  looking  fellow,  about  21  years  of  age,  with 
an  appearance  so  prepossessing  that  those  who  knew  best  how 
untrustworthy  he  was  nevertheless  could  not  keep  themselves  from 
trusting  him.  T  knew  prisoners  and  prison  life  too  well  to  over- 
estimate the  chances  of  reform,  but  I  think  this  boy  was  abso- 
lutelv  the  most  discouraging  case  that  I  ever  met. 

He  was  the  product  of  a  good  home.  Roth  his  father  and 
mother,  whom  T  came  to  know  well,  were  sincerely  religious,  and 
as  simple  as  could  be  in  their  lives.  The  father  was  the  picture  of 
sedate  trustworthiness  and  held  a  responsible  position  of  a  semi- 
public  character.  The  mother  was  a  literalist.  both  in  her  reli- 
gious views  and  her  moralitv,  but  of  kind  spirit,  besides  being  of 
exact  life.  There  was  another  boy  in  the  family  who  was  a  re- 
spectablv  model  young  man. 

This  bov.  the  vounsrer.  rn'l  left  ^  trail  nf  crime  half  the  length 
of  the  Coast  and  more  when  I  met  him.  •  He  made  not  the  slight- 
est effort  to  deny  it  after  denial  was  useless,  and  made  no  pre- 
tense^ of  penitence.  He  had  simply  played  the  fool,  to  use  his 
own  lnncrua«je.  and  n°  Didn't  know  why. 

With  the  help  of  one  or  two  others  I  got  him  out  of  prison 
nfter  six  weeks  there,  and  took  him  to  my  own  home.  The  first 
thing  that  he  wanted  before  he  would  go  into  the  house  was  a 
bath.  He  was  niceness  itself  in  his  personal  wavs.  T  got  him  a 
phce  in  the  Government  service.  He  held  it  a  few  months,  and 
did  the  thing  over  again,  worse  than  before.  Then  he  went  to 
the  penitentiary,  but  for  two  years  instead  of  fourteen,  through 
the  fatherly  interest  of  the  Judge.  When  he  came  out  T  took 
him  into  my  home  in  Oakland,  where  he  staved  till  T  got  him 
work  asrain.  this  time  also  in  a  public  institution. 

T  read  the  riot  act  to  him  then.  "This  is  your  last  chance, 
so  far  as  I  am  concerned,"  I  said.  He  swt>re  by  all  that  was  holy 


71. 

to  be  good.  He  was  for  six  months.  Then  he  stole  again.  I 
refused  at  first  to  see  him.  Then  I  thought  again,  and  again  got 
him  a  place.  After  the  very  first  time  1  had  been  perfectly  frank 
with  those  who  took  him.  A  friend  in  San  Francisco,  with  a 
marvelous  fund  of  faith  in  his  fellows,  took  him  in.  and  treated 
him  as  trustingly  as  an  own  son.  The  young  fellow  betrayed 
the  trust  almost  as  quickly  as  it  was  given.  Then  we  let  him  go. 

Strange  to  say,  the  last  I  knew  of  him  he  had  married  and 
settled  down  to  a  decent  life. 

There  was  this  other  strange  fact  to  his  credit.  Although 
he  had  two  or  three  times  the  free  run  of  our  home  there  was 
never  anything  missing.  Yet  he  confessed  that  when  the  mood 
was  on  him  he  was  helpless  and  that  there  had  been  circum- 
stances of  larger  trust  toward  him  when  the  communion  table  it- 
self could  not  hold  back  his  hands. 

I  studied  his  badness  a  good  deal.  I  think  now  it  was  rooted 
in  the  defective  goodness  of  those  around  him.  His  i>eople  were 
people  of  the  "saving"  type,  not  parsimonious,  I  think,  but  pains- 
takingly careful  of  the  pennies  which  came  their  way.  He  drank 
in  thriftiness  with  his  mother's  milk  and  learned  the  im}K>rtance 
of  money  on  his  father's  knee. 

The  church  which  taught  him  to  worship  God  also  taught 
him.  without  knowing  it,  a  more  immediate  worship  of  money. 
Its  very  minister  had  his  title  from  a  small  school  to  which  one 
of  the  principal  members  of  the  same  church  had  given  $500 
but  a  very  little  while  before.  The  connection  between  the 
two  events,  the  giving  of  the  money  and  the  getting  of  the  de- 
gree, was  a  joke  among  the  ministers  of  the  denomination  be- 
yond the  boundaries  of  the  State.  It  was  a  well-to-do  church, 
built  upon  lines  of  the  conventional  primacy  of  the  pocket  book- 
so  long  as  the  money  was  gotten  in  conventionally  respectable 
ways. 

There  was  the  trouble  with  the  boy.  He  had  not  learned 
to  take  what  belonged  to  other  people  in  legitimate  ways,  lie 
was  for  direct  action,  and  indirect  ways  of  getting  other  people's 
goods  have  always  been  more  res|>ectable.  Also  in  him  the 
desire  for  life's  comforts  and  conveniences  was  not  evenly  dis- 
tributed over  his  days,  but  sometimes  congested  in  the  form 
of  impulses  which  were  too  strong  for  a  naturally  llabby  will. 
Had  he  consumed  his  years  with  one  long,  steady  pull  to  get 
rich,  so  that  there  was  nothing  left  of  him  but  a  heart  of  stone 
covered  with  a  skin  of  parchment  it  would  have  ln-en  forgiven 
him  even  by  the  church  if  he  had  been  successful  within  the 
verv  loose  limits  of  the  law. 


72.  f 

T  am  not  excusing  him ,  nothing  of  the  kind.  He  suffered 
and  his  nearest  friends  could  not  keep  him  from  being  burned 
v  hen  he  insisted  upon  putting  his  hands  on  the  stove  to  sec 
whether  it  was  as  hot  as  before.  "Sin  and  its  punishment  grow 
on  the  same  stem."  But  the  goodness  around  him  had  never 
gripped  him.  I  suspect  that  was  so  because  it  had  never 
gripped  hold  of  God  very  profoundly  at  the  other  end.  It  was 
afraid  of  reality,  and  so  its  unreality  showed  up  big  when  it 
found  a  weak  wire  in  him.  The  bad  would  be  too  amazed  to 
be  bad  if  the  good  were  ojice  to  get  busy  ancj  be  actually  good. 


CHAPTER  XVII. 
THE  MORALS  OF  MODERATION. 

Less  than  half  a  dozen  years  ago  I  sat  in  his  own  study 
with  the  well-known  minister  of  a  well-known  church  of  another 
denomination  in  one  of  the  northern  towns  of  California.  We 
talked  with  utmost  freedom  along  theological  lines  and  with 
entire  harmony.  Before  I  left  him  he  remarked  with  a  smile: 

"Well,  I  agree  with  you  practically  in  all  your  positions, 
but  it  wouldn't  be  good  policy  for  me  to  say  these  things  in 
my  pulpit." 

The  same  remark  almost  to  the  letter  was  made  to  me  in 
my  own  study  here  in  Los  Gatos  a  year  or  so  later  by  a  neigh- 
boring pastor  of  my  own  denomination.  Only,  in  the  latter 
case,  there  was  much  pronounced  criticism  of  my  own  open 
methods  of  teaching. 

I  can  call  to  mind  offhand  now  within  the  circle  of  my  ac- 
quaintance in  Northern  California  half  a  dozen  ministers,  rep- 
resenting three  or  four  of  the  leading  evangelical  denomina- 
tions, who  have  made  like  admissions  to  me,  though  perhaps 
not  in  just  so  many  words. 

There  are  many  who  will  seize  upon  this  statement  of  the 
situation  to  condemn  the  ministry  wholesale  for  it. 

"Ministers  are  not  preaching  what  they  believe,"  these  \vill 
say.  "We  have  long  felt  so,  and  here  is  one  who  is  frank 
enough  to  set  forth  the  facts." 

Many  conservative  Christians  in  the  churches  will  join  in 
the  complaint  of  insincerity  and  will  use  my  admission  against 
the  very  progressiveness  for  which  I  stand. 

"Liberalism  does  not  make  for  honesty,"  these  will  con- 
tend. 

Which  reminds  me  of  the  old  sea  captain  who  heard  a 
schoolboy  declaim  Tennyson's  famous  lines  on  "The  Charge  of 
the  Light  Brigade'!" 

"Half  a  league,  half  a  league,  half  a  league  onward!"  re- 
cited the  boy.  But  the  captain,  in  the  confidence  of  his  nautical 
knowledge  and  utterly  void  of  imagination,  blurted  out : 

"The  old  fool !  If  he  meant  a  league  and  a  half,  why  didn't 
he  say  so  ?" 

There  are  no  fools  like  the  literalists.  whether  they  are  in- 
side or  outside  of  the  churches.  People  who  have  no  imagina- 
tion are  always  stumbling  into  absurdities  over  their  own  wooden 
logic. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  I  stand  now  for  the  open 
course.  I  do  not  believe  that  policy  is  the  best  honesty.  \\lv  ther 


74. 

honesty  is  the  best  policy  or  not.  But  I  have  found  it  better 
to  try  to  understand  men  than  I  have  to  condemn  them.  And 
the  course  which  these  men  are  pursuing  I  think  I  under- 
stand because  I  tried  it  myself  once  on  a  time. 

It  was  during  mjy  second  pastorate  in  Oakland,  with  the 
same  church  which  I  had  served  before.  I  was  with  them  the 
first  time  about  four  and  a  half  years,  the  second  time  four- 
teen months  less.  The  second  pastorate  was  on  the  face  of 
it  more  successful  than  the  first.  The  congregations  were 
larger,  often  overflowing  the  much  larger  church  building. 
My  support  was  more  liberal  by  several  hundred  dollars  a 
year.  The  additions  to  the  membership  were  many.  The  de- 
nominational press  gave  me  the  most  flattering  and  fallacious 
write-up  I  ever  had. 

The  call  to  this  second  pastorate  was  a  compromise,  in 
which  affection  prevailed  over  discretion  on  both  sides.  They 
knew  that  my  thinking  was  not  what  it  had  been  years  before, 
but  their  inquiries  were  incidental  and  they  trusted  me  to 
make  no  trouble  where  we  disagreed.  I  knew  that  their 
thinking  had  not  changed,  and  that  they  were  resolved  not  to 
change,  and  I  trusted  my  head  to  find  a  way  in  which  we  could 
work  together  in  love. 

"Religion  is  not  a  matter  of  definitions,  old  or  new ;  it  is 
a  life.  That  which  I  held  yesterday  has  passed  as  to  its  form, 
but  the  form  of  what  I  hold  to-day  will  also  change.  Why. 
then,  contend  over  the  incidental?  Let  us  rather 'talk  of  the 
big  things  of  character  and  conduct  together,  and  let  me 
lead  them  gradually  to  see  that  reality  is  not  dependent  upon 
form." 

This  program  wks,  as  I  have  indicated,  an  apparent  suc- 
cess. As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  was  a  failure  from  the  first  on 
both  sides. 

"I  suppose  I  ought  not  to  say  it,"  remarked  a  woman  to 
me  in  the  midst  of  that  second  Oakland  ministry,  "but  there 
is  something  about  your  preaching  which  makes  me  feel  that 
you  are  not  quite  sincere." 

She  was  not  a  member  of  the  church',  and  she  was  eccen- 
tric besides.  But  she  knew  me  better  than  I  knew  myself  just 
then,  and,  although  I  winced  under  her  words,  they  did  me 
good. 

I  am  not  judging  others  in  this  confession  even  at  this 
point.  I  only  know  that  the  effort  to  conceal  my  convictions 
in  what  I  dubbed  minor  matters  was  a  continual  crucifixion 
to  me.  I  could  not  give  myself  to  the  church  with  perfect  free- 
dom, and  they  could  not  accept  what  I  said  without  restraint. 


75. 

We  kept  ourselves  from  outward  contention,  but  we  kept  our- 
selves from  the  most  intimate  co-operation  at  the  same  time. 

It  was  during  that  particular  pastorate  that  a  brother  min- 
ister on  the  same  side  of  the  bay  put  his  problem  before  a 
group  of  his  fellow  ministers. 

"There  is  a  woman  in  my  church,"  he  said,  "whose  hus- 
band is  a  saloonkeeper.  She  is  an  excellent  woman,  and  I 
enjoy  ministering  to  her  and  to  her  children.  You-  all  know 
what  I  think  of  the  saloon,  and  that  I  have  no  use  for  it.  But 
i§  I  come  out  in  my  pulpit  and  denounce  the  liquor  traffic  I 
shall  lose  this  woman  and  her  family  from  the  congregation. 
Isn't  it  better  to  lead  her  on  quietly  and  give  her  the  message 
in  part  than  it  is  to  drive  her  away  from  my  ministry  alto- 
gether?" 

The  unanimity  with  which  his  proposal  of  moderation  at 
this  point  was  refused  was  interesting  and  illuminating  to  me. 

"There  can  be  no  excuse  to-day  for  any  compromise  with 
the  saloon,"  was  the  unanimous  verdict. 

"A  moral  issue,"  many  will  say.  And  it  is  not  a  moral 
issue  whether  Moses  wrote  the  Pentateuch  or  not,  or  whether 
David  was  the  author  of  certain  psalms  or  somebody  else. 
Then  w*hy  say  anything  about  these  things  if  the  saying  of  it 
makes  trouble? 

Why,  indeed,  except  that  the  issue  between  modernism 
and  medievalism  is  much  more  than  a  matter  of  the  author- 
ship of  books,  or  portions  of  books.  It  is  the  conflict  be- 
tween formal  and  spiritual. authority,  between  the  cage  of  the 
letter  and  the  boundless  atmosphere  of  life.  But  whether  this 
definition  of  the  difference  is  accepted  or  not  it  is  plainly  in 
a  personal  way  the  issue  of  whether  a  man  shall  be  free  to 
speak  all  his  soul  or  not.  If  he  is  consciously  keeping  some- 
thing back  and  is  trying  to  persuade  himself  that  it  is  not  im- 
portant because  he  cannot  utter  it,  there  is  a  moral  issue  in- 
volved. 

Can  goodness  profit  by  the  sacrifice  of  frankness?  I  tried 
to  think  so  then.  I  cannot  think  so  now. 

Most  ministers  who  pursue  the  course  of  partial  silence 
are  doing  so  neither  from  mercenary  motives  nor  because  of 
any  conscious  cowardice. 

They  are  doing  so  in  what  they  believe  to  be  the  inter- 
ests of  a  larger  good. 

"It  is  better  to  say  what  we  can  say  and  be  allowed  to 
say  it  than  it  is  to  say  all  that  we  would  say  and  be  refused 
the  right  to  say  anything  at  all.  Better  a  ministry  with  some 
minor  silences  than  to  lose  our  ministry  or  wreck  it  in  con- 
tention at  last." 


76. 

It  is  so  they  reason,  and  it  is  so  that  many  of  the  finest 
fellows  in  the  ministry  hold  to  conscious  sincerity  with  a  con- 
scious consent  to  the  withholding  of  much  which  they  would 
like  to  say.  Those  who  think  them  dominated  by  the  dollar 
or  by  a*  timid  spirit  do  them  wrong. 

Yet  I  believe  their  reasoning  is  mistaken  and  mischievous 
in  a  high  degree.  The  one  proposition  to  which  I  am  con- 
tinually returning  in  this  confession  is  that  the  half  good  is 
the  most  dangerous  enemy  of  the  good.  It  is  for  this  I  have 
written,  not  to  either  exhibit  or  justify  myself.  Because  I 
have  come  to  it  through  years  of  personal  travail,  I  am  tell- 
ing this  truth  in  a  personal  way.  The  half  good,  whether  of 
faith  or  of  deed,  is  that  which  we  mean  when  we  talk  of  good- 
ness, and  it  is  that  more  than  the  open  misconduct  or  the 
open  unbelieving  of  the  world  which  is  the  chief  impediment 
to  better  thinking  and  to  better  life. 

It  is  neither  the  open  sins  nor  the  open  insincerities  of 
men  which  we  have  most  need  to  fear.  It  is  the  goodness 
which  stops  short  of  being  good,  and  the  truthfulness  which 
stops  short  of  being  altogether  true. 

A  word  more  at  this  point.  When  a  man  for  the  sake  of 
harmony  in  larger  matters  consents  to  play  a  part  in  small 
matters  it  is  the  small  matters  which  are  emphasized  in  the 
mind  of  the  one  who  has  forced  the  concession  upon  him. 
The  only  way  to  lead  men  out  of  the  letter  is  to  refuse  to  walk 
with  them  in  it  yourself. 

One  evening  in  that  second  ministry  in  Oakland  I  sat  up 
late  in  my  study  talking  with  two  of  the  leading  men  of  the 
congregation.  The  question  which  we  discussed  till  after  10 
o'clock  that  night  was  this :  How  could  Ralph  Waldo  Emer- 
son be  saved  inasmuch  as  he  did  not  believe  in  the  deity  of 
Jesus  Christ? 

Both  of  these  men  are  in  the  prime  of  life.  They  are  in- 
telligent fellows,  as  the  world  goes.  But  with  all  my  efforts 
to  explain  that  a  man's  salvation  is  not  something  external 
to  him,  but  is  the  actual  status  of  his  moral  health,  and  that 
the  relation  of  Jesus  to  our  salvation  is  not  one  of  intellectual 
definition  on  our  part,  but  of  vital  correspondence  with  him  in 
spiritual  experience  and  attitude,  these  men  in  their  devotion 
to  dogma  could  not  see  how  Emerson,  with  all  his  acknowl- 
edged excellence,  could  possibly  have  been  saved. 

Some  time  afterward  one  of  these  men  appeared  before 
a  certain  legislative  committee  at  Sacramento  to  protest  on 
behalf  of  his  employers  against  the  eight-hour  law  for  women. 


77. 

The  womanhood  of  the  factory  for  which  he  spoke  is  to  a 
considerable  extent  a  girl-womanhood  of  a  very  immature  and 
impoverished  sort. 

Yet  I  speak  of  his  action  here  not  with  reference  to  the 
single  act  itself,  nor  with  regard  to  the  special  circumstances 
of  that  particular  situation.  I  have  used  the  incident  simply 
to  show  the  manner  in  which  good  men  may  so  misplace  the 
emphasis  of  their  thinking  as  to  make  their  very  goodness 
a  social  menace  and  offense.  To  live  in  theological  abstrac- 
tions or  personal  pieties  and  proprieties  when  one  ought  to 
live  in  the  forward  movements  of  the  race  is  to  make  one's 
personal  excellencies  more  dangerous  than  the  personal  de- 
ficiencies of  another  man  who  has  the  more  serviceable  public 
spirit. 

And  men  are  not  going  to  be  helped  to  right  thinking  by 
the  evasive  silences  of  their  teachers.  You  cannot  stop  grown 
men  from  playing  with  dolls  by  joining  them  in  their  play. 
Only  an  absolutely  honest  man  can  help  other  men  to  be  as 
honest  as  they  have  need  to  be.  If  you  are  going  to  lead  your 
fellows  into  the  light  the  first  requirement  is  that  you  shall 
walk  in  all  of  the  light  that  you  have  yourself.  Being  silent 
about  even  small  convictions  is  no  way  to  breed  big  convic- 
tions in  others- 
It  was  because  in  my  own  experience  I  became  sick  of 
all  compromising  silences  before  my  people,  and  because  I  de- 
termined that  for  myself  I  must  be  first  of  all  a  man,  whether 
I  remained  a  minister  or  not,  that  I  left  Oakland  and  all 
thought  of  another  pastorate  for  a  time.  My  tilt  with  the  au- 
thorities in  Oakland,  of  which  I  am  about  to  speak,  had 
nothing  to  do  directly  with  the  closing  of  my  pastoral  serv- 
ice there. 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 

WHERE  CRIME  BEGINS. 

One  event  of  my  second  pastorate  in  Oakland  it  is  im- 
possible to  pass  without  mention  here,  although  I  have  no  de- 
sire to  stir  up  heart-sickening'  memories  in  others,  nor  to  dwell 
at  length  upon  my  own  limitations  of  social  understanding  at 
the  time.  But  the  experience  brought  vividly  before  me  the 
futility  of  our  present  punitive  attitude  toward  crime,  and 
opened  up  to  me  in  a  startling  way  the  social  origins  of  much 
of  the  individual  offending  which  we  stupidly  insist  upon  treat- 
ing in  a  purely  individual  way. 

A  young  man  of  my  congregation,  one  of  exceptionally 
lovable  personality,  was  murdered  for  the  money  that  was  on 
him,  under  circumstances  of  peculiar  atrocity.  I  was  on  my 
vacation  at  the  time  at  Lake  Tahoe,  was  called  home  just  be- 
fore he  died  and  it  fell  to  me  to  bury  him.  It  proved  to  be 
that  he  had  been  killed  by  certain  boys  of  the  neighborhood 
who  had  gone  on  from  one  phase  of  rowdyism  to  another  un- 
til their  lawlessness  ended  in  this  ruthless  act.  They  had 
not  intended  the  death  of  their  victim,  but  they  showed  them- 
selves inhumanly  indifferent  to  the  consequences  for  him  in 
order  to  possess  themselves  of  his  money. 

There  had  long  been  a  degree  of  rowdyism  in  our  neigh- 
borhood which  was  more  than  a  neighborhood  disgrace.  Even 
after  this  culminating  crime  the  disturbed  conditions  contin- 
ued far  into  the  fall  and  winter  months.  Police  protection 
was  inadequate  and  reports  were  frequent  of  offenses  on  the 
streets  at  night  which  threatened  a  repetition  of  the  affair,  or 
worse.  There  were  circumsances  in  connection  with  the  pros- 
ecution of  the  offenders  in  this  particular  case,  and  their  as- 
sociates in  much  previous  and  hitherto  unpunished  lawless- 
ness, which  did  not  contribute  to  calm  the  public  mind  in  our 
part  of  the  city. 

I  dealt  with  the  matter  from  my  pulpit  at  first  in  quite 
an  individual  way.  It  was  evident  enough  that  the  boys  them- 
selves were  not  wholly  to  blame^  but  I  went  no  farther  than 
did  most  others  in  the  neighborhood  at  the  time,  and  was 
content  to  seek  the  cause  in  the  want  of  proper  discipline  and 
education  at  home.  It  gave  me  an  opportunity  to  say  some 
very  plain  things  to  other  parents  of  the  neighborhood  whose 
children  were  in  danger  of  traveling  the  same  road.  I  was 
especially  severe  on  the  willingness  of  fathers  and  mothers  to 
defend  their  offspring  against  a  reasonable  disciplinary  au- 


79. 

thority  in  school  and  other  public  places,  and  to  take  their 
part  whether  they  were  right  or  not.  So  far  as  I  touched  on 
the  social  aspects  of  the  matter  at  all,  it  was  to  insist  that  a 
man  ought  to  hold  the  public  welfare  above  partiality  for  his 
own  child,  and  that  he  ought  not  to  defend  even  his  own  flesh 
and  blood  against  a  just  punishment  for  crime. 

I  preached  a  series  of  sermons  on  "The  Boy  Problem." 
and  by  special  request  followed  these  with  a  second  on  "The 
Girl  Problem."  Their  style  was  more  sensational  than  T  would 
make  them  now.  The  people  responded  with  the  largest  at- 
terldance  the  church  had  ever  known.  One  of  the  newspapers 
exploited  many  of  my  more  epigrammatic  sayings,  and.  al- 
though there  were  minor  criticisms  on  the  part  of  conserva- 
tive members,  the  popular  success  of  my  methods  and  the  per- 
suasion that  my  arrows  were  pointed  in  the  right  direction, 
whether  they  were  too  much  feathered  or  not,  gave  me  the 
cordial  support  of  my  congregation  as  a  whole. 

It  was  shallow  work  as  I  see  it  now.  That  which  fol- 
lowed was  a  little  deeper,  but  it  was  far  from  sounding  the 
depths.  T  was  looking  in  the  direction  from  which  the  trouble 
came,  but  I  had  need  to  see  a  good  deal  further  yet. 

As  I  had  said  some  very  plain  things  about  parents  be- 
fore, I  said  some  very  plain  things  about  the  city  and  about 
civic  government  now.  In  neither  case  did  I  speak  as  con- 
servatively and  judicially  as  T  might  have  done.  P>ut  there 
was  need  of  plain  words  from  some  one.  and  I  was  stirred 
to  the  heart  with  the  outrages  which  had  happened  and  with 
the  prospect  of  more. 

Sensationalism  in  a  preacher,  as  long  as  it  follows  indi- 
vidual lines,  is  seized  upon  approvingly  by  even  the  paid  and 
kept  press.  Let  him  touch  the  sources  of  social  corruption  and 
those  who  profit  by  it  will  at  once  take  the  alarm.  That  por- 
tion of  the  press  in  Oakland  which  had  grown  fat  on  graft 
and  which  has  been  ever  since  the  consistent  defender  of  in- 
decency on  both  sides  of  the  bay,  was  at  once  stirred  up 
against  me  and  proceeded  to  stir  up  the  authorities  to  a  course 
of  procedure,  which,  however  it  may  have  seemed  to  discredit 
me,  was  of  no  particular  credit  to  themselves. 

looking  backward  at  the  matter  after  the  lapse  of  years, 
and  after  I  have  come  myself  to  more  moderate  faith  in  the 
efficiency  of  mere  police  methods.  1  have  no  desire  to  con- 
ceal my  own  fault  I  spoke  in  terms  too  sweeping  at  the 
time.  The  information  which  I  had  received  was  confiden- 
tially given  and  could  not  IK'  publicly  used.  ( lood  people  who 
ought  to  have  been  willing  in  the  interests  of  the  public  \\cl- 


80. 

fare  to  tell  what  they  had  told  me  were  constrained  by  per- 
sonal timidity  or  economic  interest  to  keep  silence,  and  I  could 
not  in  honor  so  much  as  mention  their  names.  I  was  there- 
fore put  in  the  position  of  having  said  publicly  what  I  could 
not  with  legal  evidence  publicly  maintain. 

Having  said  this  much  sincerely  about  my  own  course  I 
am  bound  to  say  with  equal  sincerity  that  the  methods  of  the 
authorities  were  as  mistaken  as  my  own.  How  much  sin- 
cerity there  was  back  of  them  I  do  not  know,  and  I.  am  not 
disposed  to  raise  that  issue  now.  There  was  vastly  more  of 
the  spectacular  on  both  sides  than  there  should  have  been. 
Had  the  authorities  tried  as  hard  to  uncover  the  crookedness 
in  civic  affairs  as  they  did  to  cover  themselves  against  public 
accusation  they  could  have  justified  the  substance  of  all  that 
I  had  said  and  could  have  served  the  community  to  much 
better  effect. 

That  this  was  so.  one  incident  toward  the  close  of  the 
matter  proved.  \Yhen  my  friends  had  failed  me  and  the  good 
people  of  Oakland  stood  in  silent  acquiescence  while  the  for- 
mal evasion  of  the  facts  went  on  a  man  from  the  underworld 
came  to  me  and  proffered  his  help.  He  made  no  pretense  of 
any  high  public  motives,  but  he  was  willing  if  need  be  to  al- 
low me  the  use  of  his  name.  Tt  was  not  necessary.  That 
which  he  had  told  me  was  easilv  proved.  Within  a  stone's 
throw  of  the  verv  room  in  which  the  Grand  Jury  sat  when 
they  formulated  their  clearance  of  the  city's  character  against 
whnt  I  had  said  was  one  of  the  worst  brothels  of  the  town, 
which  was  doing  not  onlv  its  own  lawless  business  in  open 
contempt  of  the  authorities  of  the  city,  but  was  selling  liquor 
after  midnight  hours,  an  offense  explicity  against  the  law.  This 
1  proved  by  sending  men  one  Saturday  evening  to  make  per- 
sonal investigation,  and  these  investigators  were  ready  with 
any  public  proof  which  might  be  reciuired.  The  woman  who 
ran  this  resort  was  at  the  same  time  living  in  one  of  the  well- 
known  hotels  of  Oakland  in  open  adultery  with  one  of  the 
clerks  of  the  Superior  Court. 

I  said  so  openly  from  my  pulpit,  withholding  both  his 
name  and  hers,  but  offering  to  give  them  to  anv  authorities 
of  the  city  who  would  call  upon  me  for  them.  There  was  a 
flurry  of  talk  in  the  papers  and  on  the  streets  the  next  day, 
and  certain  of  the  authorities  loudly  proclaimed  their  inten- 
tion of  callinjT  npon  me  nt  once  for  the  proof.  They  never 
did.  The  guilty  man  stayed  away  from  his  desk  for  some 
days,  but  although  he  thus  betrayed  his  identity  he  suffered 
no  harm  in  an  official  way.  Nearly  two  years  later,  in  the 
summer  of  1<X)7.  while  T  was  traveling  in  the  East,  'the  woman, 
in  a  fit  of  iealous  rage,  threw  the  contents  of  a  bottle  of  vit- 
riol into  the  man's  eyes  while  he  was  attending  a  banquet, 


81. 

from  the  effects  of  which,  after  a  few  days  of  horrible  suffer- 
ing, he  died.  But  even  this  did  not  open  Oakland's  official 
eyes. 

My  own  eyes  opened  slowly  to  the  real  significance  of 
all  this  sort  of  thing.  Yet  this  I  perceived  dimly  at  the  time, 
that  the  roots  of  the  rowdyism  and  the  consequent  crime  in 
our  own  suburban  section  of  the  city  ran  into  the  cellars  of 
the  best  homes  in  Oakland,  and  not  only  the  homes  from  which 
the  offenders  themselves  came.  Even  the  shameful  liaisons 
of  this  w"oman  and  this  man.  and  the  exploitation  of  vice  by 
which  she  lived  and  many  of  her  kind,  was  a  part  of  the  price 
which  the  city  paid  for  a  goodness  which  was  most  superficial- 
ly and  indifferently  good. 

Oakland  respectability  was  built  on  foundations  of  for- 
tunes made  by  selling  the  rights  of  the  poor  to  special  priv- 
ilege. To  secure  this  sale  a  more  or  less  open  alliance  was 
made  with  the  vendors  of  vice  and  with  the  exph  «;ers  of  the 
weaknesses  of  men.  such  as  the  brothels,  the  gambling  houses 
and  the  saloons.  To  maintain  this  alliance  a  certain  ineffi- 
ciency of  the  police  force  of  the  city  was  necessary.  One  of 
the  by-products  of  this  inefficiency  was  the  rowdyism  which 
ended  in  murder  that  Saturday  night  on  the  "Old  County  road." 
Therefore  I  say  that  the  roots  of  that  rowdyism  and  tint  crime 
were  interwoven  with  the  foundation  stones  of  many  of  the 
finest  homes  in  Oakland,  and  laid  hold  more  or  less  on  the 
inefficient  morality  of  all  the  decent  people  of  the  town. 

This  is.  I  believe,  a  sound  analysis  of  all  our  civic  cor- 
ruption, and  to  a  large  extent  of  all  our  criminal  life.  \W 
prepare  a  kind  of  mornl  mushroom  soil  in  which  to  grow  tb" 
quick  fortunes  which  honest  labor  could  never  in  a  thousan-1 
years  produce.  What  wonder  if  some  of  the  erowth  which  fal- 
lows is  of  an  openly  jx)isonous  character.  Keep  a  city  "  oak 
enough  to  let  legal  plunder  go  on  and  all  kinds  of  i11**"-»l  '-hin- 
dering will  breed  there  as  naturally  as  staMes  breed  Hies.  Nine- 
tenths  of  what  we  call  crime  is  by-product  of  what  we  call 
business. 

This  is  the  thing  which  T  ought  to  have  said  in  Oakland 
then  and  which  T  did  not  know  enough  to  cay.  It  would  have 
been  harder  to  sav  than  what  T  did  say.  My  own  people  were 
not  disturbed  appreciably  bv  the  effort  to  discredit  me  in  wib- 
lic.  Some  of  them  had  told  me  the  things  on  which  I  had 
based  my  utterance*,  and  they  knew  that  in  substance  mv 
charges  were  true,  whether  the  phrasing  of  them  was  fortu- 
nate or  not.  Moreover,  it  was  easv  enough  for  them,  as  it 
is  for  the  averacre  congregation,  to  stand  attacks  uix»n  the  citv 
government.  There  were  very  few  of  them  who  depended 
upon  the  city  government  for  their  support.  But  tlu-v  did 
depend  upon  business.  Their  own  respectability  was  involved 


82. 

in  the  moral  accountability  of  industrial  and  commercial  insti- 
tutions. To  have  proven  that  they  were  themselves  partners 
in  the  offending  would  have  been  a  far  more  unpleasant  task. 
Muck-raking  is  popular  in  proportion  as  it  is  punitive  of  some- 
body else.  And  that,  as  I  saw  afterward,  is  exactly  where  all 
our  muck-raking  fails.  It  is  a  kind  of  scapegoat  superstition 
by  which  we  punish  a  more  or  less  guilty  individual  here  and 
there  and  let  ourselves  go. 

Elsewhere  in  these  articles  I  have  said,  with  what  may 
seem  to  some  like  an  unfeeling  severity,  that  in  general  crim- 
inals are  a  stupid  lot.  They  are.  If  they  were  really  shrewd, 
they  would  be  respectable  and  get  all  the  advantages  of  doing 
wrong  in  polite  ways.  The  man  who  accepts  a  bribe  is  a  fool. 
The  man  who  gives  it  is  not  much  better.  It  is  far  more 
profitable  to  be  the  man  who  hires  both,  or,  better  yet,  the 
man  who  hires  him,  or  the  dividend  drawer  still  two  or  three 
grades  of  respectability  removed.  It  is  nicer  yet  to  be  the 
women  folks  of  the  family  who  carry  the  prayer  books  or  the 
theater  tickets,  for  that  matter,  bought  with  part  of  the  plun- 
der. But  this  is  not  a  nice  or  a  safe  thing  to  say  in  public.  It 
isn't  even  wise  in  a  worldly  way,  as  I  learned,  to  tell  what 
you  know  about  the  wrongs  that  involve  respectable  officials. 
The  thing  that  is  safe  is  to  hammer  the  saloons  and  the 
brothels,  or  if  they  are  too  closely  associated  with  the  sources 
of  your  revenues,  to  go  after  the  men  who  already  have  the 
stripes  on  them,  or  the  boys  who  are  headed  toward  prison 
doors.  That  is  safe,  and  you  can  satisfy  your  moral  enthusi- 
asm and  win  the  approval  of  all  who  are  ready  to  rebuke 
with  you  the  individual  and  the  disreputable  wrong-doing  with- 
out danger  of  disturbing  respectability  at  the  point  where  its 
unearned  revenues  begin.  But  crime  doesn't  begin  with  sa- 
loons. It  doesn't  even  begin  with  city  officials.  When  vou 
get  to  its  origin  you  will  find  that  most  of  our  respectability 
comes  from  the  same  source. 


CHAPTER  XIX. 

THE  ETHICS  OF  THE  EAST. 

I  left  Oakland  not  because  of  anything  which  I  had  said, 
hut  because  of  some  things  which  I  wanted  to  say.  And  be- 
cause I  thought  it  impossible  to  find  a  pulpit  in  California 
where  I  could  say  all  my  soul.  I  turned  my  face  toward  the 
East.  ij.j,!r: 

I  had  been  twenty  years  on  the  Pacific  Coast  and  had  seen 
nearly  every  portion  of  it  from  Yautepec.  in  the  "tierra  cali- 
ente"  south  of  Mexico  City,  to  Vancouver,  across  the  British 
border  on  the  north.  T  had  tasted  an  exceptional  variety  of 
experience,  so  far  as  the  ministry  is  concerned,  and  had  made 
mvself  acquainted  with  all  sorts  of  service  which  is  commonly 
called  good-  I  knew  the  high  inspirations  of  the  ministry  in 
a  spiritual  way.  I  knew  the  comforts  of  its  home  and  family 
aspects.  T  had  tried  evangelism  wtih  what  seemed  like  suc- 
cess. I  had  ministered  to  many  in  a  personal  way.  Prisons 
and  asylums  T  knew,  and  all  kinds  of  charitable  work.  The 
goodness  of  the  coast  had  been  sincerely  good  to  me.  And  yet  I 
had  found  this  very  goodness  one  of  the  chief  obstacles  in 
the  way  of  the  larger  good  which  T  had  come  to  feel  the  min- 
istry ought  to  mean.  I  could  not  do  the  good  T  wanted  to  do 
in  the  fields  that  I  knew  best,  because  there  the  lesser  good 
occupied  the  ground. 

The  Eastern  trip  was  a  iourney  of  exploration  rather  than  a 
journey  of  expectation.  T  did  not  go  with  any  thought  of  seek- 
ing a  pastorate  there.  T  just  wanted  to  see  if  goodness  was 
hrgcr  in  the  East  than  it  was  here:  if  truth  wats  freer  on  the 
other  side  of  the  Rockies  than  on  this  side. 

I  had  been  East  just  once  in  the  twenty  years,  six  years 
before.  That  trip  lasted  three  months  and  took  me  from  sea  to 
sea.  T  was  making  observations  then,  but  not  under  the  most 
favorable  conditions.  This  time  I  took  eight  months  for  the 
tour.  I  tarried  more  or  less  in  twenty-one  States.  I  lec- 
tured and  preached  in  large  cities  and  small,  and  held  evan- 
gelistic meetings  along  lines  of  the  "new  evangelism"  with 
rural  congregations  and  with  one  or  two  churches  of  some 
prominence.  T  attended  upon  Or-  Torrey's  evangelistic  meet- 
ings in  Chicago,  and  spent  two  weeks  with  the  summer  con- 
ference of  Christian  workers  in  Xorthfu-ld.  Mass.  1  was  with 
the  Salvation  Army  at  Old  Orchard.  Maine,  and  in  the  fa- 
mous Fulton  street  noonday  prayer  meeting  in  New  York  City. 
I  heard  the  priest  l>cfore  a  crowded  congregation  in  St.  Pat- 


84. 

rick's  on  Fifth  avenue,  and  Dr.  Dawson  before  a  much  more 
fashionable  gathering  in  the  Fifth  Avenue  Presbyterian 
Church,  a  little  nearer  Central  Park,  and  attended  upon  Sun- 
day evening  service  at  the  Judson  Memorial  on  the  edge  of 
Washington  Square  down  town.  I  met  ministers,  evangelists, 
laymen  of  national  and  international  reputation.  And  every- 
where I  looked  to  see  whether  the  good  was  in  the  way  of 
the  larger  good  . 

Let  me  tell  my  impressions  in  three  or  four  incidents  which 
happened  by  the  way.  One  of  them,  the  P>oston  -story,  belongs 
to  the  earlier  trip. 

One  evening  I  dined  in  a  prominent  city  of  the  Middle 
West  with  one  of  the  most  prominent  men  in  the  educational 
circles  of  the  West.  He  is  not  a  church  man,  but  so  far  as  I 
could  see.  showed  no  hostility  to  either  churches  or  creeds, 
except  when  they  got  in  the  way  of  human  good.  This  inci- 
dent he  told  me  in  quite  an  unimpassioned  way,  with  more  of 
discouragement  than  resentment  in  his  tones. 

"I  had  occasion  to  attend  a  little  while  ago  a  notable  ban- 
quet in  Chicago."  he  said.  "There  were  many  men  of  promi- 
nence present  from  all  the  professions.  The  discusions  turned 
largely  upon  issues  of  public  welfare.  It  was  pathetic  to  me 
that  in  nearly  every  instance  the  burden  of  protest  and  prog- 
ress was  taken  up  by  men  of  secular  connections,  laymen,  and 
that,  generally  speaking,  the  churchmen  present  were  apolo- 
gists for  the  existing  order,  and  especially  for  the  big  special 
interests." 

A  little  later  T  was  in  Chicago  myself  and  was  invited  to 
address  our  denominational  ministerial  gathering  there-  My 
theme  was  "The  Message  of  Jesus  to  the  Men  of  Today." 
Two  points  I  made  in  particular,  openness  to  truth  and  human 
interest — that  is,  the  passion  for  men.  I  spoke  freely  and  with 
a  sense  of  opportunity  which  made  the  hour  of  much  impor- 
tance to  me. 

The  discussion  which  followed  could  hardly  have  been 
more  reactionary  had  it  taken  place  in  San  Francisco  or  Los 
Angeles.  There  were  exceptions,  and  the  speakers  who  ac- 
cepted my  message  were  men  of  more  than  local  prominence. 
But  the  mere  suggestion  that  ministers  might  do  well  .to  read 
R.  J.  Campbell's  "New  Theology/'  which  was  just  out,  before 
they  condemned  it  brought  down  upon  the  head  of  the  speak- 
er and  the  name  of  the  London  minister  a  denunciation  and 
dissent  which  was  barely  kept  inside  the  limits  of  courtesy. 
Much  of  personal  kindness  indeed  was  shown  both  then  and 
afterward,  but  the  men  who  held  our  leading  churche§  showed 


85. 

themselves  still  followers  of  a  most  conservative  evangelistic 
and  individualistic  faith. 

One  of  those  who  received  my  message  told  me  this  ex- 
perience of  his  own.  He  was  called  up  one  day  over  the  tel- 
ephone by  a  brother  minister  and  urged  to  be  ready  on  the 
following  Monday  to  deal  vigorously  with  Dr.  J.  B.  Foster's 
recent  writing  on  "The  Finality  of  the  Christian  Religion." 
Supposing  it  to  be  a  pamphlet  or  booklet  he  went  over  to  the 
University  of  Chicago  library  to  get  it  and  found,  to  his  sur- 
prise, that  it  was  a  large  and,  for  most  ministers,  an  expen- 
sive work.  Nevertheless  he  paid  his  four  dollars  and  took 
the  book  home. 

The  proposed  condemnation  of  the  book  did  not  proceed 
smoothly  in  the  ministers'  meeting,  owing  to  the  influence  of 
the  university  men  and  their  friends.  This  particular  min- 
ister, while  not  prepared  to  indorse  the  book,  was  one  of  th  >se 
who  would  not  vote  against  it.  and  maintained  that  heresy 
trials  were  no  proper  part  of  the  ministers'  meeting.  One  of 
his  deacons  took  him  to  task  for  not  acting  with  those  who 
were  ready  to  anathematize  the  book  offhand. 

"Have  you   read  the  book,  deacon?"  asked  the  minister* 

"No,  I  haven't,  and  I  don't  want  to  read  it,"  said  the 
other  man.  "I  know  all  I  want  to  know  about  it  now." 

"Well,  I  have  read  it  in  part,  deacon."  said  the  minis- 
ter, who  is  a  man  of  pluck,  "and  while  there  are  some  things 
in  it  with  which  I  do  not  agree,  there  is  much  with  which  I 
do,  and  I  am  not  going  to  condemn  it." 

The  deacon  balked  in  consequence  and  would  not  per- 
form his  functions  in  the  church,  so  that  it  became  a  ques- 
tion whether  he  or  the  pastor  would  have  to  go.  in  which  the 
church  as  a  whole  took  the  pastor's  part.  But  I  found  many 
men  of  the  deacon's  mind  in  the  East,  and  good  men,  too,  in 
their  own  limited  way.  They  had  some  truth  and  they  were 
using  it  to  keep  themselves  from  getting  more.  I  do  not  mean 
that  they  intended  'it  so.  but  this  was  the  practical  result. 

Before  I  tell  the  Boston  story,  let  me  make  it  very  plain 
that  I  am  not  telling  all  that  I  saw  and  heard.  There  was 
much  that  was  delightful  in  the  church  life  of  the  Fast,  as  I 
had  found  much  that  is  delightful  in  the  church  life  of  the  West. 
Miracles  of  moral  healing  are  wrought  there  also.  The  social 
life  is  less  manifest  to  a  stranger,  but  when  once  inside  the 
family  feeling  is  not  wanting  and  the  fellowship  is  often  fine. 
Missionary  and  philanthropic  work  is  splendidly  sustained  by 
the  churches  of  the  East,  and  the  sacrifices  of  many  of  the 
givers  would  shame  the  selfishness  of  some  of  the  recipients 


86. 

in  the  West  to  whom  ihe  funds  are  sent.  If  I  do  not  speak 
more  at  length  concerning  the  lovablcness  of  much  of  the 
Christian  living  which  I  found  in  the  East  it  is  because  my 
story  must  be  brief  at  this  point  and  because  1  am  empha- 
sizing throughout  another  point  of  view.  There  is  much  good 
among  the  churches  and  among  respectable  circles  everywhere. 
The  man  who  does  not  find]  it.  whether  east  or  west,  has  some- 
thing seriously  the  matter  with  himself. 

But  there,  as  here,  the  good  is  the  chief  hindrance  to 
the  better-  And  there,  as  here,  the  whole  attitude  toward  good- 
ness on  the  part  of  most  of  those  who  are  reckoned  respectable 
and  even  religious  is  misleading  to  a  mischievous  degree. 

I  sat  at  meat  in  Boston  on  th^t  first  visit  there  to  which 
I  have  referred  with  one  of  the  leaders  of  New  England's  re- 
ligious life.  He  is,  in  a  careful  Eastern  way,  something  of  a 
progressive  himself. 

"The  churches  here,  as  far  as  I  have  seen  them,"  I  said 
in  answer  to  his  interest  in  my  impressions,"  do  not  seem 
to  be  very  different  from  the  churches  on  the  Pacific  Coast. 
\  have  hardly  seen  enough  of  them  to  pass  jiulgmen*.  But  I 
feel  as  though  your  men  who  are  succeeding  here  are  men  of 
methods  rather  than  men  with  a  message :  that  you  are  mak- 
ing more  of  institutions  than  of  inspiration." 

"I  think  it  is  so."  he  replied,  quietly,  "I  have  heard  most 
of  the  men  around  Boston,  and  I  have  not  found  one  who 
has  a  message  for  me." 

My  second  visit  intensified  that  impression.  Both  religion 
and  respectability,  generally  speaking,  are  good  enough  ;-i 
Boston  for  those  who  have  them.  They-  don't  want  anythin  ? 
better  New  methods  are  permissible  within  reasonable  boun- 
daries of  propriety,  but  a  new  message  that  is  really  vital  can 
only  find  utterance  through  more  or  less  disreputable  chan- 
nels. New  England  goodness  is  very  carefully  restri:":iig  Xew 
England  from  the  understanding  and  pursuit  of  the  best.  Yet 
some  things  are  being  said  there,  even  ill4  Respectable  circles, 
which  are  big  with  hope.  If  only  the  good  there  could  forget 
their  phylacteries  and  their  prayer  tassels  and  all  the  rest  of 
the  paraphernalia  of  their  piety  for  awhile  and  could  get  into 
really  human  contact  with  the  foreigners  in  the  factories  and 
the  sweated  laborers  behind  the  looms  there  would  be  a  power 
in  their  goodness  beyond  anything  of  which  they  dream  to-day. 

Northfield.  beautiful  beyond  words,  is  strangely  far  re- 
moved from  the  religious  reality  which  Xew  England  needs. 
I  watched  a  red-headed  lad  in  the  gallery  of  the  big  audi- 
torium making  notes  on  J.  Campbell  Morgan's  lectures  on  the 


87. 

Book  of  Romans.     The  boy  was  about  twetve  years   of  age. 

He  evidently  thought  he  was  interested  and  was  doing 
the  devout  thing,  although  it  was  as  unlikely  that  he  got  any- 
thing out  of  it  except  pious  self-satisfaction  as  it  was  that 
he  understood  Sanskrit.  Xorthfield  is  redolent  with  the  odors 
of  yesterday's  religiosity  and  today's  respectability.  It  is  a 
garden  of  flowers  which  makes  one  long  for  a  few  common 
vegetables.  Sinners  are  welcome  the.re,  very  welcome  in  a 
way — the  way  of  making  just  one  particular  type  of  saints 
out  of  them.  But  Xorthfield  is  farther  away  from  Lawrence 
than  Nova  Scotia  is  from  San  Francisco  Bay.  They  only 
know  a  man  in  one  posture,  the  posture  of  conventional  prayer. 
They  talk  continually  of  the  new  birth  there,  but  the  agony 
of  the  new  social  birth  is  to  them  but  the  symptom  of  an  al- 
ready labeled  individual  disease.  Their  ethic  is  personal,  pro- 
vincial, pious.  They  are  still  talking  in  terms  of  the  ages  be- 
fore machinery  was  known.  They  are  looking  to  the  skies 
for  the  climax  of  a  spectacular  and  supernatural  sahfation 
which  cannot  wait  on  the  slow  working  of  reallv  spiritual 
forces  in  the  world.  And  meanwhile  the  Man  of  Xazareth 
comes  from  the  bench  of  the  artisan  again. 

I  came  back  from  the  East  as  bewildered  as  when  I  went 
away.  I  had  touched  life  here,  the  man  of  the  store  and  the 
street,  the  prisoner  behind  the  bars, 'the  workingman  in  his 
new  comradeship,  feeling  his  wav  toward  the  new  democracy 
They  had  filled  me  with  a  big  dissatisfaction  with  formal  re- 
ligiousness, with  the  limitations  of  individual  goodness  which 
I  saw  resting  upon  the  back  of  the  oppressed  with  no  sense  of 
its  own  parasitical  character.  T  had  heard  the  call  of  the  hu- 
man, but  I  knew  not  how  to  voice  its 'cry.  I  had  not  found 
the  pulpit  of  the  West  open  to  it.  The  pulpit  of  the  East  was 
not  less  closed.  Sometimes  I  wondered  if  I  could  find  the 
democracy  of  Jesus  of  which  I  was  trying  to  talk  on  the  other 
side  of  the  sea. 


CHAPTER  XX. 

'  • 

THE  SWELLING  FLOOD. 

Between  Englarid  and  America  there  is  a  wide  waste  of 
water.  I  was  six  years  old  when  I  crossed  it  the  first  time, 
coming'  this  way.  Seven  times  six  years  had  passed  when  1 
crossed  it  again,  going  eastward  this  time.  My  impressions 
of  the  first  journey  were  a  child's  impressions  and  are  only 
dimly  recalled.  The  second  journey  across,  and  the  return,  left 
ui>on  me  memories  of  so  much  more  than  incidental  impor- 
tance that  all  my  thinking  about  civilization  is  affected  by 
them  now.  I  never  saw  the  shallowness  of  conventional  good- 
ness so  clearly  as  I  saw  it  on  board  ship. 

At  the  time  I  hardly  understood  my  impressions  myself. 
I  knew  that  I  was  not  happy  on  shipboard,  and  that  my  physi- 
cal conditions  had  nothing  to  do  with  it.  Neither  going  nor 
coming  did  seasickness  disturb  me  to  the  extent  of  making 
me  miss  a  single  meal.  Going  over,  old  ocean  was  as  placid 
as  an  inland  lake  on  an  ordinary  afternoon,  with  this  differ- 
ence onlv.  that  the  waters  moved  in  slow,  far-reaching  swells. 
We  were  literally  "rocked  in  the  cradle  of  the  deep,"  but  in  a 
very  easy,  drowsy  wav.  Coming  back,  fog  and  storm  beset  us, 
and  the  way  was  cold,  for  it  was  late  November.  I  remember 
\valking  the  deck  one  da.y  when  we  were  "off  the  banks"  and 
in  the  very  neighborhood  where  the  ill-fated  Tit'anic  (went 
down  a  few  months  later,  and  thinking  what  a  fearful  thing 
a  wreck  would  be  in  such  a  situation.  But  none  of  these  things 
moved  me  to  the  deep  dissatisfaction  with  the  transatlantic  trip 
which  grows  upon  me  whenever  T  think  of  it  to  this  day. 

Elsewhere  I  have  written  more  at  length  concerning  this 
experience,  and  concerning  our  days  .in  Great  Britain.  I  am 
writing  of  that  adventure  here  with  just  one  point  in  view. 
But  I  do  not  owe  this  way  of  looking  at  my  sea  experience  to 
this  present  writing.  Rather  is  the  present  writing  an  out- 
growth of  conditions  of  thinking  which  have  been  ripening 
for  manv  years  and  which  ripened  very  rapidlv  while  I  was 
out  of  sight  of  land.  I  know  now  that  I  saw  civilization  best 
when  I  was  away  from  it.  or,  to  say  the  thinsr  more  exactly, 
when  it  was  compressed  in  one  monstrous  miniature  before 
my  eves. 

So  much  has  been  written  about  the  restfulness  of  life 
aboard  one  of  the  big  "liners,"  and  so  much  has  the  "palatial" 
character  of  the  liners  themselves  been  exploited  in  word  and 
picture  that  I  recognize  the  fact  that  mv  complaint  will  seem 
at  first  utterly  unreasonable  to  many  who  read  these  words. 
Good  people  a-plenty  have  gone  across  and  have  thoroughly 


89. 

enjoyed  the  good  company,  the  good  fare  and  the  opportunity 
to  rest  from  the  ordinary  distractions  of  life  on  land.  The 
praise  of  the  passage,  when  it  can  be  taken  without  the  dis- 
comfort of  seasickness,  has  been  so  convincingly  set  forth 
by  the  best  writers  that  I  knew  some  will  think  I  must  at 
least  have  been  bilious  while  on  shipboard  to  speak  of  the 
matter  so.  Which  only  leads  me  to  remark  that  nothing  is 
more  positive  proof  of  the  heartlessness  of  a  lot  of  our  good- 
ness than  the  way  in  which  multitudes  of  respectable  and  re- 
ligious people  "enjoy  Europe"  with  not  the  slightest  token  that 
they  ever  had  the  slightest  stirring  of  social  consciousness  from 
the  day  they  packed  their  trunks  till  the  day  they  unpacked 
again. 

The  "ocean  palaces"  are  well  named,  I  freely  admit. 
"Palaces"  they  are,  indeed,  with  all  the  snobbery  and  the  ab- 
surd inequalities  and  rank  injustice  of  the  world  of  luxury 
and  fashion  and  unearned  wealth  gathered  into  the  smallest 
possible  space  and  exhibited  in  the  most  glaring  characters. 

Neither  going  nor  coming  was  our  ship  crowded,  except 
under  our  feet.  Even  there  the  poor  were  packed  in  a  little 
less  uncomfortably  than  common,  I  was  told.  Above  us,  in 
the  "First  Cabin,"  a  few  solitary  figures,  remote  and  morose 
as  Napoleon  at  St.  Helena,  swathed  in  concealing  draperies, 
stalked  the  decks  from  which  we  were  excluded  as  if  they 
were  meditating  continually  on  the  price  which  they  had  paid, 
chiefly  for  our  exclusion. 

But  the  mockery  of  the  moneyed  mummies  above  us  did 
not  concern  me  as  did  the  humanness  of  the  company  that 
crowded  the  squalid  quarters  below.  Some  will  say  that  squallid 
is  too  strong  a  word  to  use  in  view  of  the  improvement  which 
has  taken  place  of  late  years  in  "third  cabin"  accomodation. 
But  I  went  below,  and  went  all  through  those  quarters  my- 
self as  far  as  considerations  of  sex  would  allow.  I  saw  some- 
thing, as  much  as  my  stomach  would  comfortably  let  me  see. 
and  more,  of  the  messy  manner  in  which  they  were  fed.  1 
saw  the  berths  where  they  slept,  and  talked  with  men  who 
had  closer  experience  of  them  than  I  cared  to  know.  I  studied 
the  men  and  women  who  were  there,  and  the  accomoda- 
tions  for  their  comfort  and  well-being  during  the  long  days 
and  nights  on  board.  And  besides  this  I  studied  the  crew, 
though  not  as  intimately  as  I  might  have  done,  and  learned 
much  of  the  manner  of  life  which  they  lived  on  whom  our 
own  comfort  and  prosperity  depended  in  larg«-  degree.  Like- 
wise I  attended  religious  services — Roman  Catholic  and  An- 
glican Catholic,  and  plain  Protestant — in  the  cabins  high  and 


90. 

low.  And  I  have  never  in  my  life  felt  more  the  possible  im- 
pieties of  pious  profession,  the  substantial  irreligiousness  of 
formal  religion,  or  the  contemptable  indecency  of  current  re- 
spectability. A  ship  at  sea  is  a  minature  of  our  still  most 
undemocratic  and  unchristian  world.  The  Christian  man  who 
can  cross  in  one  of  them  without  feeling  it  is  tremendously 
in  need  of  a  "new  birth."  And  the  shame  of  our  Americanism 
is  not  that  we  spend  annually  millions  of  unearned  increment 
and  legalized  piratical  toll  in  spectacular  displays  abroad  of 
the  failures  of  democracy  at  home,  but  that  even  our  well-to-do 
common  people  and  our  peregrinating  educators  and  pulpiteers 
do  not  know  a  denial  of  democracy  when  it  is  thrust  under 
their  eyes.  We  have  thought  of  goodness  itself  so  much  in 
terms  of  certain  proper  abstinences  and  on  the  active  side  in 
terms  of  formal  religiosities  and  self-complacent  philanthropies 
that  we  look  on  our  commercial  inhumanities  as  a  matter  of 
course  and  do  not  know  that  they  give  the  lie  to  both  the 
patriotism  and  the  piety  which  we  profess.  A  week  on  ship- 
board ought  to  be  enough  to  make  any  decent  man  feel  the 
moral  indecency  of  the  whole  respectable  regime  to  which  he 
belongs. 

There  is  one  point  on  which  I  have  not  touched  here, 
and  on  which  I  do  not  need  to  dwell.  A  word  will  explain  it 
to  those  who  can  understand,  and  volumes  would  be  wasted  on 
those  who  on  either  sea  or  land  have  no  sense  of  anything 
but  physical  sensation  in  life.  Everywhere  if  a  man  opens  his 
eyes,  the  mystery  of  life  grows  big  upon  him.  Nowhere  is 
that  mystery  more  omnipresent,  more  oppressive  than  it  is  at 
sea.  And  in  the  midst  of  that  vast  solemnity  to  have  the 
heartlessness  and  the  hypocrisy  of  civilization,  condensed  before 
ycu  is  to  experience  a  moral  chill  which  no  words  can  tell. 
With  nothing  to  see  but  the  limitless  waters,  with  nothing  to 
do  but  to  putter  with  life's  incidentals,  and  with  the  world's 
social  sham  and  shame  glaring  before  you  more  searchingly 
than  the  light  that  flares  back  at  you  from  the  shimmering 
waters,  the  effect  upon  a  man  who  dares  to  think  real  thoughts 
and  experience  real  feelings  is  to  all  but  overthrow  the  ration- 
ality of  the  universe  in  his  mind.  Yet  therq  is  nothing  really 
the  matter  with  the  universe.  The  matter  is  with  us,  and  with 
rur  "goodness"  most  of  all,  that  it  is  still  such  a  halt  and 
maimed  and  blind  thing. 

The  government  of  Great  Britain  more  than  any  govern- 
ment of  equal  political  significance  is  busy  now  "doing  good." 
I  studied  all  her  chief  cities  as  much  as  the  unaccustorriedness 


91. 

of  my  circumstances  and  the  limitations  of  time  ami  money 
would  allow.  Such  traveling  a.s  we  did  insid  *  the  hor  Icrs  of 
(jreat  Britain  was  dominated  neither  by  scenic  ITT  historic 
considerations,  although  we  had  regard  to  both  of  these,  as 
was  inevitable.  We  did  not  know  what  we  had  seen  till  we 
were  able  to  close  our  eyes  after  it.  was  all  over  and  see  it 
mentally  again.  I  have  been  two  years  recovering  fr  in  the 
bewilderment  of  the  unusual  and  the  personal  in  th  t  c  m tact 
with  my  own  country  wherein  1  f.nmd  myself  a  "nativ\  foreign- 
er," and  had  an  experience  so  rare  in  many  of  its  as  ects  as 
to  seem  almost  unreal.  X'ow  that  the  incidental  hn-  fallen 
into  its  place  T  can  view  in  their  true  proportions  the  rc.ijly  big 
things  that  we  saw. 

The  biggest  of  them  all  was  K  Aland's  effort  to  \  s  really 
religious,  and  respectably  respectable.  The  churches  disap- 
pointed me,  and  in  the  main  seemed  to  me  to  be  mouthing  shib- 
boleths as  far  removed  from  the  word  the  twentieth  century 
needs  as  our  obsolete  orthodoxies  of  respectability  over  here. 
I  did  not  hear,  even  from  K.  J.  Campbell,  the  prophet's  call  to 
the  righteousness  which  our  age  imperatively  needs. 

Only  one  man  uttered  it  in  my  hearing,  and  he  in  a  very 
incidental  way,  so  that  it  was  hard  to  judge  how  far  he  had 
seen  the  vision  of  a  really  moral  world.  I  heard  David  Lloyd 
George  in  the  English  House  of  Commons  discussing  in  the 
committee  of  the  whole  his  famous  insurance  bill.  Me  was 
too  busy  to  see  me.  and  I  was  too  unimportant  to  force  my- 
self upon  him.  P>ut  I  met  the  other  members  of  his  family, 
as  I  have  elsewhere  told,  and  I  studied  him  in  the  reflection 
of  his  influence  upon  the  British  public,  and  since  I  returne  1 
I  have  tried  to  understand  what  I  saw  of  what  he  and  men 
like  him  are  trying  to  do  on  the  other  side  of  the  sea.  It 
comes  the  nearest  to  real  gtxulness  of  anything  of  the  sort 
which  I  have  anywhere  seen. 

David  Lloyd  George  is  a  far  letter  man  than  the  other 
David  of  whom  we  mumble  too  much  in  ^>ur  pulpits  in  a  very 
suj>erficial  way.  Those  who.  on  the  other  side  of  the  sea. 
mumble  most  superficially  about  the  other  David  are  those 
who  most  despise  the  doughty  Welshman  who  l>ears  the  truly 
great  name.  One  of  the  l>cst  tokens  that  David  Lloyd  (leorgc 
is  actually  worthy  of  the  respect  of  the  ages  is  that  lie  is 
so  cordially  hated  by  a  host  of  his  respectable  contemporaries. 
They  hate  him.  not  because  his  goodness  is  not  good,  but  lie- 
cause  he  is  trying  to  make  their  goodness  something  more 
than  the  canting  cover  for  all  sorts  of  social  injustice  which  it 
is  today.  Any  man  who  tries  to  make  good  people  really  g'»od 


92. 

is  the  worst  kind  of  a  bad  man  in  the  high  circles  of  both 
church  and  state. 

I  am  only  afraid  that  Lloyd  George  himself  is  going  to 
be  satisfied  with  a  half-way  goodness.  He  is  forcing  the  re- 
spectable robberies  of  England  into  the  open,  and  its  plunder- 
ing piosities  are  trembling  with  rage  because  he  has  pulled 
off  the  surplices  which  cover  their  shame.  They  are  willing 
to  buy  him  off,  and  the  great  common  horde  which  is  behind 
him,  by  letting  go  some  of  the  feathers  if  they  may  keep  the 
fowls  on  which  they  have  been  fattening.  Even  the  loss  of 
the  feathers  is  a  discomfort  which  they  can  hardly  endure. 
Without  the  fowls — words  fail. 

Will  Lloyd  George  be  satisfied  when  he  has  won  a  partial 
victory?  Will  the  people  behind  him  "rest  and  be  thankful'' 
when  the  lords  of  their  living  have  granted  them  some  seats 
outside  the  walls  on  which  to  unburden  their  overworked  limbs, 
and  let  the  lords  still  keep  the  substance  of  the  earth  enclosed 
against  them  ?  Concessions  are  more  dangerous  than  opposi- 
tion. It  is  goodness  again,  at  a  bankrupt  percentage,  offering 
to  settle  with  us  for  ten  cents  on  the  dollar  if  it  may  keep  the 
other  ninety  which  is  our  honest  due.  Goodness  is  always  do- 
ing that  sort  of  thing,  both  with  God  and  Man.  We  are  will- 
ing enough  to  be  nice  about  our  naughtiness  if  we  can  keep 
the  profits  of  our  naughtiness.  The  difference  between  most 
good  people  and  most  bad  people  is  that  the  bad  people  insist 
on  doing  it — no,  "doing  us" — in  their  shirt-sleeves,  while  the 
good  people  are  kind  enough  to  please  us  by  wearing  some 
really  well-made  clothes.  It  isn't  the  clothes  to  which  I 
object.  I  honestly  admire  them.  It  is  the  using  such  good 
clothes  for  business  that  isn't  good. 


CHAPTER  XXI. 
GOODNESS   IN   A    DRY   TOWN. 

The  greatest  victory  of  goodness  in  Los  Gatos  is  that  it 
has  met  and  conquered  the  saloon.  The  fight  was  long,  and 
was  complicated  with  many  other  issues  of  a  personal  and  so- 
cial character.  There  were  reverses,  due  in  the  main  to  the 
purposeful  obscuring  of  the  real  question.  The  issue  was  forced 
in  the  first  place  by  the  saloons  themselves. 

This  story  was  told  me  by  one  of  the  leading  merchants 
of  Los  Gatos.  He  is  not  a  member  of  any  church  and  seldom 
attends  upon  any  preaching.  As  a  business  man  and  citizen 
generally  his  standing  has  always  been  first  class. 

There  was  a  man  here,  young  enough  yet  to  be  called  a 
young  man,  although  he  had  a  family  of  his  own.  A  good 
man  under  ordinary  circumstances,  he  was  so  addicted  to  drink 
that  for  the  sake  of  it  he  would  let  his  family  starve  while 
he  squandered  his  earnings  across  the  bar. 

One  day  his  father,  seeing  the  obvious  need  of  the  familv. 
gave  the  man  five  dollars  to  get  some  supplies  for  the  wife 
and  children.  A  little  later  in  the  evening  the  father  discov- 
ered that  the  family  need  had  not  been  met.  1  fe  suspected 
the  truth,  and  going  to  one  of  the  saloons  he  found  his  son 
sitting  at  a  table  where  he  had  been  drinking  and  otherwise 
dissipating  that  which  had  been  given  him  to  supply  the  table 
at  home. 

Without  a  word  of  protest  the  younger  man  rose  in  re- 
sponse to  his  father's  quiet  word  and  went  out.  The  father 
lingered  a  moment,  and  approaching  the  man  behind  the  bar 
said  to  him  in  a  modest  and  reasonable  way.  "I  wish  you 
wouldn't  sell  my  boy  any  liquor.  He  needs  what  he  has  for 
hi.s  family,  and  he  can't  stand  drink." 

The  saloon  keeper  turned  upon  him  contemptuously.  "Von 
go  to  h — 1,"  he  said.  "I'll  sell  liquor  to  whoever  I  please." 

The  same  business  man  who  told  me  this  named  half  a 
dozen  men  or  more  whom  he  had  known  in  this  town,  all  men 
of  naturally  fine  qualities  and  good  industrial  and  professional 
capacity,  who  had  each  and  all  fallen  into  a  drunkard's  grave 
within  the  term  of  his  residence  here. 

'I  am  not  naturally  a  prohibitionist  at  all.  and  1  don't  call 
myself  one  now.  but  that  sort  of  thing  has  made  me  ^ick  of 
the  saloon  here,"  he  remarked. 


94. 

One  other  word  needs  to  be  said.  The  temperance  people 
did  not  at  first  proix>se  to  close  the  saloons  outright;  they  asked 
only  for  Sunday  closing.  It  was  the  saloons  themselves  which 
in  the  arrogance  of  their  persuasion  that  they  had  the  people 
at  their  mercy  refused  to  accept  any  curtailing  of  their  liber- 
ties, and  challenged  the  church  people  to  make  the  issue  ab- 
solute, saloon  or  no  saloon.  It  was  not  until  they  were  unex- 
pectedly beaten  on  their  own  ground  that  they'  posed  as  ad- 
vocates of  "moderation"  themselves. 

That  which  has  happened  here  is  going  to  happen  all  over 
the  United  States.  The  saloon  has  no  capacity  for  self-re- 
form, and  will  die  rather  than  be  decent. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  the  fight  against  the  saloon  was 
won  here  by  the  church  people.  There  were  men  outside  of 
the  churches,  and  women,  who  helped  on  the  victory,  as  in 
the  instance  of  the  business  man  to  whom  I  have  referred,  but 
in  the  main  outside  respectability  was  either  neutral  or  nega- 
tive. On  the  straight  issue  of  saloon  or  no  saloon  today,  how- 
ever, the  decency  of  the  town  whether  outside  or  inside  of  the 
churches,  is  all  but  unanimous  against  the  return  of  the  sa- 
loon. 

If  in  this  series  of  articles  I  have  said  more  of  the  de- 
ficiencies of  goodness  inside  the  churches  than  I  have  of  the 
deficiencies  of  goodness  outside  of  the  churches  it  has  been 
chiefly  due  to  the  (net  that  my  own  life  work  has  been  mainly 
with  church  people,  and  that  church  people  are  .reasonably 
supposed  to  represent  emphatically  the  righteous  cause.  But 
lest  I  contribute  to  an  increase  of  Phariseeism  in  a  quarter 
where  it  is  already  evident  enough,  and  lest  by  lack  of  candor 
I  cater  to  a  favor  for  myself  which  I  do  not  want,  let  me  say 
right  here  some  things  which  need  to  be  said  about  the  short- 
comings of  non-religious  respectability. 

I  have  always  had  a  liking  for  the  man  on  the  outside. 
Generally  speaking  he  is  freer  from  cant,  piosity  and  the  whole 
parade  of  ritualistic  and  dogmatic  righteousness. 

Down  in  Maine,  on  my  Eastern  trip,  I  heard  this  story 
and  enjoyed  it:  At  one  of  the  big  summer  resorts  not  far  from 
Portland  a  wealthy  woman,  very  pious  and  very  irritable  and 
arrogant,  was  staying.  One  morning  she  complained  in  ex- 
ceedingly bad  temper  that  she  had  been  annoyed  by  some  man 
swearing  under  her  windows. 

"Oh."  said  the  hotel  owner,  to  whom  the  complaint  was 
made,  "that  was  mv  manager.  He  is  really  a  very  decent 
fellow.  That  is  just  his  way  of  saying  his  prayers,  madam, 
and  he  doesn't  mean  them  any  more  than  you  do  yours," 


95. 

I  know  men  whose  swearing  is  less  offensive  to  me  than 
some  other  men's  prayers.  They  at  least  are  genuine,  and  gen- 
erally their  indignation  is  directed  against  the  thing  that  is 
hypocritical  and  inhuman,  i  know  of  nothing  more  blasphe- 
mous, than  a  cannibalism  which  says  grace  before  meals. 

But  I  have  found  that  omitting  the  formulas  of  religion 
does  riot  necessarily  make  men  better.  They  may  be  less  marked 
non-religious  respectability  has  its  own  piosities.  I  have  found 
by  superficial  insincereties,  though  even  this  is  not  always  so,  for 
more  affectation  of  tone  and  manner  in  the  clubs,  especially  the 
more  fashionable  women's  clubs,  than  I  have  ever  found  in  the 
churches.  The  social  cant  and  pretense  of  the  "smart  set,"  or 
worse  yet  the  would-be  smart  set  of  the  small  town,  is  more  in 
evidence  than  any  cant  and  pretense  which  I  have  ever  met  in 
religious  circles. 

This,  however,  is  rather  incidental  whether  it  is  of  the 
church  or  of  the  club.  Affectation  is  too  amusing  to  be  taken 
very  seriouslv.  whether  it  affects  piety  or  propriety.  The  de- 
fectiveness  of  non-church  goodness  is  deeper  yet. 

The  larger  insincerity  of  life  is  just  as  common  among  the 
merely  respectable  as  it  is  among  the  religious. 

In  my  Oakland  ministry  one  of  the  frequent  attendants  in 
the  evening  was  a  man  who  was  always  superciliously  com- 
plaining about  the  hypocricies  of  church  members.  lie  had 
had  religious  training,  had  been  intimate  with  church  affairs, 
and  "had  seen  too  much  of  the  dishonesty  of  ministers  and 
church  members  to  have  any  patience  with  either." 

Whether  he  thought  me  honest  or  not  I  do  not  know. 
From  the  friendliness  with  which  he  treated  me  I  suppose  he 
thought  well  of  me.  I  liked  him. 

I  had  a  chance  to  test  his  work  just  once,  and  it  was  as 
insincere  a  job  as  I  ever  saw.  The  reasons  may  have  been 
economic.  I  do  not  know  the  price  he  was  paid  for  the  work. 
Hut  T  know  the  work  itself  was  of  a  kind  of  which  any  truly 
honest  man  ought  to  have  been  ashamed. 

Nothing  is  more  common  than  the  accusation  that  ministers 
trim  their  teachings  to  suit  their  salaries.  Some  of  them  do, 
though  much  more  in  the  way  of  silence  than  in  the  way  of  say- 
ing what  they  do  not  believe.  Hut  moral  cowardice  is  much 
more  rare  among  them  than  it  is  among  ordinary  business  men. 
The  average  resjxxrtable  non-religious  man  in  business  will  run 
to  cover  if  there  is  any  danger  of  his  convictions  costing  him 
a  dime.  That  is  the  reason  why  commercial  Ixxlies  can  In- 
trusted commonly  to  get  on  the  wrong  side  of  all  progressive 
issues. 


96. 

Nor  is  the  economic  explanation  always  sufficient  either 
outside  of  the  church  or  in  it.  Respectability  is  sometimes  just 
heartless,  without  regard  to  money. 

One  of  my  brother  ministers  in  this  neighborhood  met  the 
appeal  of  the  petition  against  capital  punishment  with  a  dog- 
matic refusal. 

"Capital  punishment  is  right,  and  1  know  it.  The  scripture 
is  plain  enough.  "Whoso  sheddeth  man's  blood,  by  mdil  shall 
his  blood  be  shed." 

One  of  the  chief  ministers  of  his  own  church  proved  in  an 
elaborate  treatise  sixty  years  ago  that  the  Bible  was  on  the  side 
of  African  slavery.  And  he  lived  in  Vermont  and  not  in  Vir- 
ginia when  he  wrote  the  book. 

The  same  petition  against  capital  punishment  was  presented 
to  a  man  who  is  not  a  church  member,  a  public  official  in  this 
vicinity,  and  presumably  a  man  of  decent  personal  morals.  He 
replied  succinctly.  "Stop  hanging  them?  Xo,  d — n  it.  I'd 
like  to  see  a  lot  more  of  them  hung." 

I  canvassed  the  streets  of  San  Jose  one  evening,  bearing 
that  petition,  with  anotjier  minister.  He  is  a  liberal,  a  scholar, 
an  optimist.  It  was  perfectly  plain  to  him  that  this  was  a  pro- 
gressive measure,  in  the  direction  of  the  forward  movement  of 
man,  and  he  could  see  no  reason  why  any  man  should  refuse  to 
sign  it,  unless  he  were  a  hide-bound  theological  conservative. 

He  talked  with  man  after  man  on  the  streets.  Most  of 
them  were  plainly  not  church  men,  and  had  no  interest  in  the- 
ology. They  were  not  street  loafers.  They  were  just  average 
respectable  business  men.  By  and  by  he  came  back  to  me.  He 
was  both  physically  and  morally,  to  use  a  picturesque  expres- 
sion, "tuckered  out." 

"I  am  not  sure,"  he  said  with  a  whimsical  smile,  "but  that 
I  do  believe  in  capital  punishment  after  all." 

But  it  was  not  the  criminals  that  he  wanted  to  hang.  And 
the  criminals  themselves  could  not  have  talked  more  heartlessly 
about  the  matter  than  did  some  of  those  respectable  men. 

There  is  a  current  morality  among  us  which  is  more  dan- 
gerous thn  religious  pretense.  It  is  the  morality  which  deems 
it  sufficient  if  a  man  pays  his  debts,  treats  his  family  decently, 
abstains  from  drink  or  knows  how  to  drink  without  getting 
drunk,  wears  good  clothes,  and  does  his  grafting  without  get- 
ting into  trouble  with  the  law.  Its  god  is  success,  and  its  work- 
ing creed  is  respectability.  -And  there  is  nothing  that  stands 
more  in  the  way  of  the  world's  progress  than  this  sort  of  thing 
today. 

All  that  I  have  written  thus  far  about  the  defectiveness  of 


97. 

religious  goodness  applies  to  this  non-religious  respectability 
with  equal  or  with  greater  force.  It  is  as  pretentious,  as  patroniz- 
ing, as  pauperizing,  as  insincere.  It  defends  even  more  desper- 
ately the  perquisites  of  special  privilege,  and  the  dividends  of 
social  robbery.  It  stands  in  with  the  worst  elements  in  the 
churches  against  the  best  efforts  of  our  time  on  behalf  of  the 
common  good.  It  is  Sadducean  in  spirit,  but  it  can  be  counted 
on  generally  to  make  common  cause  with  Phariseeism  whenever 
there  is  a  real  Messiah  to  be  done  to  death.  It  has  all  the 
heartlessness  of  religious  heartlessness  without  conscience  enough 
to  even  covet  the  shelter  of  a  creed- 

This  I  have  felt  that  I  must  say  in  faithfulness  before  I  sum 
up  what  1  have  come  to  feel  concerning  all  our  goodness  through 
years  of  acquaintance  with  goodness  in  its  every  phase.  Some 
of  the  selient  features  of  my  experience  1  have  told.  Let  me  tell 
in  a  few  words  more  what  these  experiences  mean  to  me. 


CHAPTER  XXII. 
A  POET'S  WAY  OF  PUTTING  IT. 

One  of  the  men  who  called  me  pastor  a  few  years  ago  was 
Joaqnin  Miller.  He  was  not  a  member  of  my  church,  nor  of 
any  other  church,  I  am  quite  sure.  He  was  never  so  much  as 
an  attendant  in  my  congregation.  But  I  have  a  letter  yet  in 
which  he  dubs  me  "pastor,"  and  I  had  the  pleasure  and  profit 
of  more  than  one  pastoral  call  at  his  cabin  on  "The  Heights." 
The  profit,  I  think,  was  chiefly  on  my  side. 

Miller  hated  cant  and  insincerities  of  every  sort.  His  con- 
tempt for  the  conventional  was  so  pronounced  that  it  became 
almost  a  formalism  itself.  His  brusqueness  was  more  marked 
than  that  of  Moody. 

Once,  I  remember,  he  lectured  at  "California  College/'  our 
local  Baptist  school.  He  came  to  the  platform  with  his  trousers 
tucked  in  the  tops  of  his  boots.  What  he  said  was  very  much 
in  the  same  style.  The  pastor  of  our  leading  church  in  Oak- 
land went  up  to  him,  when  the  address  was  done  and  with  a 
broad  smile,  said : 

"I  enjoyed  your  lecture  very  much,  Mr.  Miller." 

"Well,  don't  lie  about  it:  if  yon  do  you'll  go  to  hell,"  was 
the  instant  response  of  Miller. 

The  last  time  I  talked  with  him  in  his  cabin  on  "The 
Heights"  mention  was  made  of  the  work  that  he  had  done 
with  his  own  hands.  He  was  proud  of  the  walls  which  he  had 
built,  and  the  multitude  of  trees  which  he  had  planted. 

"Fifty  thousand  trees!"  he  ejaculated,  "all  growing  on  Sun- 
day." 

That  last  remark  was  more  than  a  challenge  to  my  clerical 
character.  It  was  his  affirmation  of  the  freedom  of  nature  from 
all  our  formal  restraints.  The  soul  of  his  protest  against  insti- 
tutionalism  was  there. 

"Of  course,  I  have  made  mistakes,"  he  confessed  in  that 
same  conversation.  "Take  the  mistakes  out  of  my  life  and  I 
wouldn't  have  six  bits  left." 

Again,  referring  to  his  laborious  life,  he  said,  with  fine 
antithesis.  "I  don't  know  whether  T  have  worked  so  hard  be- 
cause I  have  been  so  strong,  or  whether  I  have  been  so  strong 
because  I  have  worked  so  hard." 

I  think  I  understand  Joaquin  Miller  now  better  than  I  did 
in  those  days  when  I  talked  with  him  face  to  face.  I  might 
have  talked  with  him  far  more  than  I  did.  But  T  am  not  writ- 
ing of  Miller  either  to  exploit  him  or  the  measure  of  my  ac- 
quaintance with  him.  I  have  told  these  incidents  and  these  say- 


99. 

ings  of  his  here  because  they  express  in  a  concrete  way  so  much 
of  the  substance  of  that  which  I  have  come  to  feel  is  lacking  in 
the  respectable  goodness  of  the  world.  Miller's  impatience  of 
our  ordinary  insincerities,  his  contempt  for  formalism,  the  large- 
ness of  his  charity  toward  others,  and  his  wholly  unsanctimon- 
ious  humility  toward  himself,  and  finally  his  faith  in  common 
everyday  labor  for  every  man  and  his  unwillingness  to  live  by 
the  sweat  of  other  men's  brows  made  him,  in  my  opinion,  a  real 
prophet  to  our  generation.  He  did  not  let  his  half  good  deceive 
him  into  thinking  that  he  had  achieved  the  good.  He  was  void 
of  cant,  conceit,  and  covetousness.  And  these  all  are  the  vices 
of  the  virtue  of  our  time,  north  and  south,  east  and  west,  and 
on  either  side  of  the  sea. 

Nothing  in  all  my  long  and  varied  experience  of  the  min- 
istry has  impressed  me  more  than  the  prevalence  of  cant.  For- 
mal phrases  and  affected  mannerisms  are  the  stock  in  trade  of 
all  respectability.  Religion  itself  is  always  running  into  relig- 
iousness, which  is  quite  another  thing.  Sincerity  in  a  superficial 
way  is  common  to  most  men :  there  are  comparatively  few  con- 
scious imposters.  In  this  sense  hypocrites  are  really  rare,  and 
most  people  at  least  mean  to  be  genuine.  But  genuineness  in 
fact,  the  higher  sincerity  of  being  simply  and  naturally  real  and 
open  to  all  reality  is  one  of  the  rarest  and  one  of  the  most  diffi- 
cult achievements  in  the  world.  The  first  sin  of  goodness  is 
its  ordinary  want  of  simple,  wholesome,  unaffected  naturalness. 

This  is  true  of  the  pulpit  itself.  Conventions  of  dress,  con- 
ventions of  attitude,  conventions  of  tone,  conventions  of  phrase, 
conventions  of  subservience  to  texts,  conventions  of  thought, 
from  beginning  to  end  the  man  in  the  pulpit  is  a  formalist  be- 
fore he  is  a  man.  We  see  it  plainly  enough  when  we  go  into 
some  church  where  the  conventions  are  more  elaborate,  or  at 
least  notably  different  from  our  own.  What  we  are  slow  to  sec 
is  that  it  is  not  the  quantity  of  our  formalism  which  makes  us 
formalists,  but  it  is  our  bondage  to  it  and  our  willingness  to  be 
unreal  for  somebody  else's  sake. 

In  the  old  Y.  M.  C.  A.  building  in  Oakland  the  Rev.  Ro]>ert 
Stuart  MacArthur  of  Xcw  York,  passing  through  the  Hay  Cities 
on  his  way  to  the  Orient,  met  one  day  a  group  of  our  ministers 
and  gave  us  a  real  heart  talk.  One  of  the  things  he  said  was 
this,  though  he  was  pleading  for  more  ritual  rather  than  less. 

"Bondage  to  ritual  is  not  a  matter  of  how  much  you  use. 
Our  hard  and  fast  services,  with  an  opening  invocation  or  short 
prayer,  a  long  prayer,  three  hymns,  a  sermon,  and  a  benediction, 
may  be  as  rigidly  ritualistic  as  a  much  more  elal»rate  service. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  we  of  the  non-ritualistic  churches  are  ju.st 


100. 

as  much  tied  up  to  our  bare  conventions  as  anybody  well  could 
be." 

Now,  I  am  not  arguing  for  ritual,  or  against  it.  I  care 
nothing  about  it,  except  when  it  gets  in  the  way  of  my  being 
natural  and  altogether  genuine.  I  object  to  all  kinds  of  tight- 
lacing.  That  is  to  my  mind  the  chief  trouble  with  all  of  the 
churches.  I  don't  like  smoking,  and  I  don't  like  spitting,  and  I 
certainly  would  not  like  to  see  saw-dust  floors  and  the  spittoon 
introduced  as  features  of  religious  meetings.  But  I  think  I 
understand  today  in  spite  of  my  repugnance  toward  a  smoke- 
laden  atmosphere  and  the  unsightliness  of  the  floors  in  places 
where  the  workingmen  gather  in  large  numbers  why  such 
places  are  more  popular  than  churches.  It  is  not  the  nastiness 
of  men  naturally,  nor  their  natural  depravity  in  any  other  way. 
The  preference  for  such  places  is  fundamentally  the  preference 
for  reality.  There  is  a  wasp-waist  Miss  Nancyishness  about  a 
lot  of  our  piety  which  makes  it  as  uninviting  to  an  ordinary  man 
with  a  lot  of  good  red  blood  in  his  veins  as  any  mincing  maiden 
of  the  old  spinster  sort  could  be.  It  is  altogether  too  much  done 
up  in  cosmetics  and  clothes. 

I  have  made  manifest  in  this  series  the  freedom  of  my  con- 
tact with  men  outside  of  the  churches  because  they  have  done 
me  this  large  service ;  they  have  made  me  ashamed  of  the  ef- 
feminacy of  a  lot  of  our  religious  life.  And  by  effeminacy  I 
do  not  mean  any  reference  to  the  preponderance  of  women  in 
the  pews,  although  doubtless  this  has  something  to  do  with  the 
ultra  "niceness"  of  ordinary  religious  meetings.  The  eman- 
cipation of  woman  is  going  to  emancipate  us  from  a  good  deal 
of  coarseness  on  the  one  hand  and  a  good  deal  of  overniceness 
on  the  other.  The  effeminacy  of  religious  gatherings  is  much 
more  than  a  matter  of  sex.  It  is  because  religion  is  too  respect- 
able that  it  runs  so  to  primping  and  to  mincing  ways.  All  re- 
spectability does  that  sort  of  thing.  Very  few  of  us  know  how 
to  be  decent  without  being  overdressed. 

Last  Sunday  night  I  spoke  at  a  Socialist  meeting  in  San 
Francisco.  Some  of  those  who  have  only  heard  me  in  church 
before  were  there  to  hear  me.  One  of  the  best  women  that  I 
know  was  there,  a  woman  whose  face  is  set  in  a  halo  of  white 
hair,  and  whose  life  is  whiter  yet  with  its  own  purity  and  kind- 
liness and  ministry  to  others.  She  had  never  been  in  such  a 
meeting  before.  Afterwards  she  remarked  to  me  with  wonder: 

"It  seemed  to  me  such  a  queer  audience  at  first,  such  a 
lot  of  common  looking  people." 

The  freedom  of  the  hall,  and  the  wholly  unconventional 
ways  of  the  audience  impressed  her  as  entirely  different  from 


101. 

the  surroundings  of  church  life  where  she  has  seen  me  hitherto. 
I  know  just  how  she  felt,  because  I  felt  that  way  myself  when 
I  launched  out  after  leaving  Oakland,  and  for  a  time  spent 
many  a  Sunday  night  oti  the  radical  lecture  platform. 

Joaquin  Miller  would  have  been  entirely  at  home  with  that 
audience  on  Sunday  night.  He  might  not  have  agreed  with 
them  in  their  thinking,  nor  they  with  him.  but  the  personal  con- 
tact would  have  been  cordial  and  understanding.  He  had  some- 
thing of  Jack  London's  liking  for  men  in  "the  raw,"  and  if  with 
both  Miller  and  London  the  rawness  seems  to  be  sometimes 
overdone  the  fault  is  on  our  side  as  much  as  on  theirs.  Over 
emphasis  there  may  be  of  purpose  with  them,  but  it  is  to  cor- 
rect the  over  emphasis  which  is  first  of  all  with  us. 

London  was  one  of  the  members  of  the  Ruskin  Club  in 
Oakland  when  I  joined  it.  He  was  in  my  parish  in  East  Oak- 
land when  he  was  working  his  way  toward  the  recognition  of 
today.  I  did  not  know  him  then  and  would  not  have  understood 
him  if  I  had  known  him.  Very  few  "good"  people  understand 
him  now  He  is  too  human  for  our  niceness  to  tolerate  him. 
He  returns  repugnance  for  our  niceness,  with  interest,  some- 
times too  much  compounded,  I  confess.  But  London  came  into 
my  life  at  a  time  when  I  needed  him,  and  together  with  a  lot 
of  men  "of  the  world,"  as  the  pious  would  say,  he  has  helped 
me  more  than  the  pious  ever  did  to  feel  how  human  and  how 
real  religion  ought  to  be. 

What  I  have  written  will  probably  not  help  London,  or  the 
memory  of  Joaquin  Miller  with  nice  people.  I  know.  It  will  only 
hurt  me  so  far  as  their  estimate  is  concerned.  Nevertheless,  I 
want  to  say  it  again,  just  a  little  more  plainly  if  I  can  before  I 
quit.  The  first  trouble  with  all  of  our  goodness  is  that  it  is  too 
far  away  from  shirt-sleeves  and  overalls.  Most  churches  make 
an  ordinary  man  feel  about  as  much  at  home  as  he  feels  in  a 
fashionable  woman's  club.  The  "feel"  of  virtue  is,  not  that  of 
denim  and  gingham,  it  is  rather  that  of  chiffon  and  lace.  Most 
of  the  men  whom  I  have  known  in  the  churches  whom  the 
churches  could  not  hold  were  men  who  wanted  to  touch  life 
humanly,  and  the  churches  were  not  human  enough  for  them. 
Big,  hearty,  red-blooded  men  do  not  take  to  the  churches.  "Billy" 
Sunday's  strength  is  not  his  theology,  it  is  his  humanity.  He 
overdoes  it,  of  course,  in  the  reaction  from  the  unreality  of  most 
of  our  religious  work.  But  he  is  much  nearer  that  which  good- 
ness needs  than  are  all  the  fine  essayists  of  all  the  pulpits  in  the 
land.  Moody  was  vastly  more  effective  before  he  became  re- 
sj>ectable. 


102. 

The  scandals  which  arise  from  the  exposure  of  outright  and 
outrageous  insincerity  in  circles  of  religion  and  respectability 
are  not  the  most  serious  menace  to  the  progress  of  real  right- 
eousness among  men.  They  are  less  injurious  than  our  ordinary 
and  unconscious  insincerities.  Bad  men  who  pretend  to  be  good 
and  are  detected  in  the  pretense  do  not  hurt  us  as  much  as  good 
men  who  are  good  but  who  do  not  know  how  to  be  human  in 
their  goodness.  More  girls  are  lost  to  goodness  through  the 
over-niceness  of  the  good,  than  through  the  maliciousness  of 
the  bad.  The  chief  trouble  with  righteousness  is  its  remoteness 
from  the  common  things  of  common  life. 

I  can  see  now  that  the  humanness  of  my  father  and 
mother  helped  me  more  than  their  piety.  There  was  no  cant 
about  their  goodness,  it  was  real  flesh  and  blood.  I  have  suf- 
fered more  from  cant  in  the  churches  than  from  anything  else, 
and  cant  in  respectable  circles  outside  the  churches.  Those  who 
have  helped  me  most  have  been  those  who  have  touched  me 
deepest  with  the  feeling  of  their  humanity.  Missionaries,  min- 
isters, slum  workers,  educators,  editors,  agitators,  I  value  them 
all  today  as  I  find  them  natural,  unaffected,  open-minded  and 
open-hearted,  simply  and  wholesomely  and  humanly  sincere, 
without  cant,  without  piosity,  and  without  pretense. 


CHAPTER  XXIII. 
"NEITHER  Do  I  CONDEMN  THEE." 

The  most  human  thing  that  1  heard  at  Xorthiiekl  was  a 
story  by  "Lem"  Broughton,  then  of  Atlanta,  but  now  of  Lon- 
don, England.  It  was  told  in  his  mose  effective  manner,  too 
effective  indeed  for  any  one  to  repeat  it  with  equal  effectiveness. 
It  is  a  pity  that  all  the  decent  people  of  the  nation  c^uld  not 
hear  his  telling  of  it  in  his  own  way. 

The  story  concerned  one  of  the  young  women  of  his  con- 
gregation who  had  "fallen."  She  walked  into  church  unexpect- 
edly one  morning,  when  Broughton  was  preaching  with  all  his 
heart  the  love  of  God.  Her  seat  was  far  in  the  rear  of  the  con- 
gregation, near  the  door,  where  she  herself  had  dropped  down 
in  a  timid  way. 

Carried  away  by  the  tenderness  of  his  own  message 
Broughton  gave  an  invitation  at  the  close  of  the  sermon,  al- 
though such  was  not  his  custom  on  a  Sunday  morning.  To  the 
confusion  both  of  the  preacher  and  of  some  of  the  leading  offi- 
cials of  the  church  who  knew  the  girl's  reputation  this  woman 
arose,  after  a  moment  of  hesitation,  and  made  her  way  down 
to  the  front. 

Broughton  was  very  frank  about  his  own  short-coming  of 
spirit  on  that  occasion.  He  owned  that  he  dropped  his  eyes, 
afraid  of  a  scene,  and  feeling  in  himself  the  similar  confusion 
of  his  respectable  congregation.  The  awkwardness  of  the  mo- 
ment was  increased  when  the  woman  just  as  she  reached  the 
front,  overcome  by  her  own  feelings  and  the  consciousness  of 
her  shame,  threw  up  her  arms  and  with  a  loud  cry  to  God  for 
mercy  fell  on  her  face  before  the  altar  <>f  the  church. 

The  preacher  still  hesitated,  his  eyes  downcast,  wh.-n  he 
heard  a  stirring  behind  him.  He  was  afraid  to  f«'rn-e  out  in 
his  own  mind  what  it  meant.  And  then  he  and  all  the  congrega- 
tion were  swept  away  in  a  great  wave  of  mighty  moral  uplift 
by  what  happened. 

Led  by  one  brave  girl  as  pure  as  she  was  brave  the  whole 
choir  came  down  silently  from  their  recess  behind  the  pulpit, 
and  falling  into  line  each  girl  as  she  came  opjx»sitc  the  sinful 
woman  at  the  altar  stooped  down  and  kissed  her  tenderly  on 
the  forehead. 

"They  literally  kissed  that  girl  into  heaven."  was  the 
preacher's  dramatic  conclusion,  as  he  pictured  the  effect  up m 
the  woman.  And  the  hearts  of  all  that  mighty  audience  in  At- 
lanta and  the  hearts  of  all  who  heard  tin-  telling  of  the  story  at 


104. 

NorthfieM  were  caught  up  to  heaven  also  on  the  wings  of  that 
wonderful  up-reach  of  love. 

I  wish  I  could  tell  that  story  as  a  part  of  my  own  ministry. 
I  could  forget  years  of  formalisms  for  one  such  experience  of 
•/such  a  real  Christian  humility  and  sympathy  as  that.     Yet  it 
is  something,  it  is  much  indeed,  to  know  that  so  many  can  re- 
spond to  even  the  telling  of  such  a  story  today. 

There  is  no  point  at  which  our.  goodness  commonly  falls 
more  than  it  does  with  respect  to  our  ordinary  censoriousness 
of  others.  Such  censoriousness  exhibits  itself  naturally  to 
poorest  advantages  in  the  small  town  where  everybody  knows 
everybody  else. 

A  few  days  ago  I  met  a  man  on  the  streets  of  Los  Gatos 
who  had  lived  here  for  years.  He  has  recently  moved  away 
and  makes  his  home  now  in  San  Francisco.  His  life  here  was 
blameless  in  a  moral  way.  I  do  not  remember  to  have  ever 
heard  a  word  reflecting  upon  his  character.  He  is  a  man  of 
kindly  spirit  naturally,  and  besides  his  religion  will  not  allow 
him  to  think  harshly  of  others.  It  was  all  the  more  remarkable 
therefore,  that  he  made  the  confession  he  did. 

I  had  asked  him  how  he  liked  San  Francisco.  He  spoke 
most  cordially  his  appreciation  of  the  place. 

"The  best  thing  about  it  is  this,"  he  said.  "I  have  lived 
so  long  in  a  small  town  where  everybody  knows  everybody  that 
you  can  hardly  imagine  what  a  relief  it  is  to  be  able  to  walk 
the  streets  and  just  be  one  in  the  crowd,  and  to  feel  that  nobody 
is  concerned  to  pass  judgment  upon  you." 

If  he,  who  had  suffered  so  little  from  censoriousness,  could 
feel  the  criticalness  of  our  ordinary  social  contact  whenever  it 
becomes  intimate  how  evident  is  it  that  a  really  humble  estimate 
of  ourselves  and  a  kindly  judgment  of  other  people  is  not  even 
in  good  society  a  common  mood. 

The  trouble  is  not  with  our  town.  It  is,  I  think,  freer 
from  that  sort  of  thing  than  most  small  communities  are.  Nor 
do  I  think  the  trouble  was  due  to  any  supersensitiveness  on  his 
part.  The  difficulty  is  rather  that  it  is  so  much  easier  to  be 
good  as  we  commonly  understand  goodness  than  it  is  to  be 
kind. 

At  the  bottom  kindness  means  understanding.  When  we 
understand  others,  and  especially  when  we  understand  ourselves, 
we  cannot  help  being  kind. 

The  ignorance  of  our  goodness  is  responsible  for  the  con- 
ceit of  it.  When  some  big  wave  of  circumstance  flings  wide  the 
doors  and  we  get  a  full  view  of  some  fellow  being's  heart  and 
see  how  much  like  our  own  it  is  we  forget  our  petty  pride  and 


105. 

reserve  and  for  the  moment  any  one  of  us  can  lay  all  our  cen- 
soriousness  aside  and  be  as  human  as  the  Christ  in  the  presence 
of  the  woman  who  had  sinned.  If  we  could  maintain  the  moods 
which  come  to  us  in  such  an  hour  we  would  know  something  of 
what  it  means  to  be  really  good. 

There  has  been  much  in  my  ministry  in  Los  Gatos  to  make 
me  glad.  I  could  write  of  it  readily  at  length  if  such  fulness 
could  serve  the  purposes  of  this  confession.  It  has  been  the 
freest  ministry  of  my  life.  I  have  never  done  so  much  hard 
work  nor  done  it  so  easily  as  here,  because  I  have  never  been 
so  free  from  formalisms  of  every  kind.  The  pulpit  here  seems 
to  me  the  sincerest  pulpit  I  have  ever  known,  that  is.  it  is  pos- 
sible to  speak  a  wider  variety  of  truth  here  with  concern  only 
to  serve  the  truth  in  simplicity  of  soul  than  on  any  platform 
on  which  I  have  ever  stood.  No  man  who  has  once  tasted  the 
fulness  of  freedom  can  ever  hold  it  again  second  to  anything 
in  his  life.  If  I  had  known  what  liberty  is  I  would  have  had 
liberty  before. 

But  it  has  been  easier  for  us  to  learn  liberty  here  than  it 
has  for  us  to  learn  love.  To  get  away  from  servitude  to  creeds 
and  rituals,  and  from  common  cant  of  every  kind,  is  easier  than 
to  get  into  a  really  human  fellowship  with  all  your  fellows. 

Nothing  which  I  have  said  will  bear  repetition  better  than 
that  which  I  said  in  my  first  chapter  in  this  series.  The  hardest 
test  of  virtue  is  its  attitude  toward  vice.  Liberal  churches  arc 
sometimes  more  loveless  than  illiberal  churches,  Goodness  often 
understands  badness  less  than  badness  itself. 

I  am  more  afraid  of  the  conceit  of  goodness  than  I  am  of 
its  cant.  Our  formalisms  among  ourselves  do  less  harm  than 
does  our  unfriendliness  toward  those  who  arc  outside  our  so- 
cial or  moral  pale.  Even  sincerity  cannot  turn  the  keys  of  the 
kingdom  of  heaven.  The  only  way  we  ever  let  people  into  life 
is  the  way  of  love.  And  very  few  of  us  really  love  sinners. 

More  than  anvthing  else  our  conceit  keeps  us  from  loving 
them.  We  think  they  are  so  different  from  ourselves,  when  in 
truth  they  are  very  much  like  us.  Only  sometimes  they  arc 
sinners  because  they  wanted  to  l)e  better  than  ourselves. 

Don't  misunderstand  me.  Do  you  remctnl>er  that  saying  of 
Rev.  R.  J.  Camnbcll  of  Ijomlon  which  gave  perhaps  greater  of- 
fense than  anything  else  which  he  said  in  his  famous  1>onk  on 
the  "New  Theology."  It  was  to  the  effect  that  oven  sin  innv  lx- 
a  quest  after  good.  It  is  a  mistaken  quest  which  take*  fearful 
penalty  for  its  mistakeness.  but  at  the  liottoin  what  we  know 
as  sin' began  with  a  great  hungering  of  heart  for  more  happi- 
ness, more  wholcsomcness,  more  abundance  of  life. 


106. 

Xow  there  are  some  people  who  are  not  positive  enough  to 
be  very  bad.  They  are  moral  cowards  who  never  venture  away 
from  entirely  safe  and  conventional  courses.  Their  goodness, 
.such  as  it  is,  is  purely  negative.  Lots  of  what  passes  for  vir- 
tue is  made  up  of  timidities  of  disposition  and  hardnesses  of 
self-restraint  as  unlovable  as  vice  itself.  I  am  not  sure  but 
that  a  great  deal  of  apparent  goodness  is  more  ruinous  to  char- 
acter than  some  of  the  misadventures  of  men  who  have  at  least 
had  the  openness  of  heart  to  fare  forth  in  search  of  a  larger  life. 
The  mere  impassiveness  of  a  negative  nature  which  hasn't  life 
enough  in  it  to  feel  the  pull  of  life  may  pass  the  formal  tests 
of  respectability,  but  I  dare  to  believe  that  it  will  fare  worse 
in  the  eternal  working  out  of  the  issues  of  character  than  much 
which  we  have  called  vice. 

I  am  not  sure  but  that  the  prodigal  son  even  before  he 
turned  back  was  a  more  hopeful  proposition  by  far  than  his 
very  proper  and  negatively  heartless  elder  brother. 

I  have  known  a  good  many  men  of  very  defective  habits 
who  had  more  of  the  humanness  of  real  character  about  them 
than  many  a  more  proper  man.  This  I  say  quite  apart  from 
those  social  considerations  which  must  be  weighed  carefully  if 
we  are  to  measure  fairly  our  merit  or  demerit.  Propriety  is  irt 
an  individual  way  sometimes'  the  headiest  kind  of  a  servant  for 
the  most  serious  social  impropriety.  But  of  that  I  shall  speak 
yet  more  at  length.  What  I  mean  here  is  that  character  is  a 
good  deal  more  than  outward  conduct,  just  as  health  is  a  good 
deal  more  than  a  superficial  flawlessness  of  skin.  There  may 
be  outward  blemish  and  more  health  inside  than  where  the 
blemish  does  not  appear.  I  have  found  a  great  many  "men  of 
the  world"  more  Christian  in  spirit  than  many  who  mouth  un- 
consciously the  Master's  name. 

Joaquin  Miller  wrote  a  bit  of  verse  years  ago  better  than 
anything  he  ever  said  to  me.     It  would  vastly  improve  our  good- 
ness if  we  could  really  learn  it  "by  heart."     Here  it  is : 
''In  men  whom  men  condemn  as  ill 
I  find  so  much  of  goodness  still. 

In  men  whom  men  pronounce  divine 

I  find  so  much  of  sin  and  blot 
I  hesitate  to  draw  a  line 

Between  the  two,  where  God  has  not." 

My  old  pulpit  classifications  of  "saved''  and  "unsaved," 
"sinners"  and  "saints"  have  already  passed  for  me.  I  am  afraid 
to  use  them,  excent  ns  I  use  all  of  them  and  all  together  for 
everybody  else  and  for  myself.  I  am  both  "saved"  and  "un- 
saved," both  "sinner"  and  "saint"  if  I  can  trust  my  own  con- 


107. 
k 

sciousness.  And  I  would  rather  trust  it  than  to  trust  any  kind 
of  a  mechanical  theory  which  ministers  to  spiritual  self-conceit. 
I  have  found  the  church  and  its  ministers  helpful,  that  is 
why  I  stick  to  them  in  spite  of  their  very  obvious  shortcomings. 
But  I  have  found  that  badness  and  goodness  cannot  be  meas- 
ured by  any  ecclesiastical  or  theological  or  social  scales.  There- 
is  so  much  badness  in  all  the  goodness,  so  much  goodness  in  all 
the  badness,  that  I  am  more  and  more  of  the  opinion  that  all  our 
formal  sitting  in  judgment  on  one  another  is  a  colossal,  yes,  a 
criminal  self-conceit.  I  would  not  substitute  pity  for  con- 
demnation, though  that  would  often  prove  a  real  advance.  But 
our  badness  does  not  need  pity  half  so  mcuh  as  it  needs  under- 
standing. And  that  is  one  of  the  chief  defects  of  all  our  good- 
ness, its  lack  of  a  big,  human  understanding  love.  Goodness 
could  melt  badness  away  if  only  it  had  the  warmth  of  its  heav- 
enly origin  in  itself. 


CHAPTER  XXIV. 
THE  PIETY  OF  THE  PARASITE. 

Since  I  became  pastor  in  Los  Gatos  two  of  my  friends  of 
other  years  have  gone  to  the  penitentiary,  convicted  in  both 
cases  of  having  misappropriated  other  people's  money.  They 
were  leaders  in  respectable  and  religious  society  five  y  irs  ago. 
They  are  wearing  stripes  as  common  felons  today. 

One  of  these  men  I  knew  but  casually,  yet  I  knew  him  as  an 
active  and  influential  member  of  one  of  the  leading  evangelical 
churches  in  the  community.  His  income  was  large,  in  appearance 
at  least,  and  he  had  the  entrance  to  the  best  society  in  town.  He 
served  the  state  in  a  high  legislative  office  before  he  was  brand- 
ed with  the  colors  of  crime. 

The  other  man  I  knew  intimately,  and  his  father  before  him. 
He  came  of  one  of  the  finest  families  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  a 
family  of  much  more  than  ordinary  moral  stamnia.  He  was 
brought  up  in  the  atmosphere  of  prayer.  His  own  domestic  cir- 
cle was  of  the  religious  type.  He  was  himself  an  earnest  and 
devout  Christian,  and  not  at  all  of  the  canting  kind.  His  friends 
trusted  him  implicitly,  and  I  would  have  trusted  him  myself  with 
all  I  have.  Besides  he  had  a  salary  quite  sufficient  for  any  rea- 
sonable man's  needs,  fifteen  to  twenty  times  greater  than  the  av- 
erage yearly  earnings  of  the  average  working  man.  Neverthe- 
less, he  gambled  heavily  with  other  men's  money,  not  as  ordinary 
gamblers  do  but  in  a  business  way,  the  luck  of  the  game  went 
against  him,  and  shame  unspeakable  has  overtaken  him  and 
the  innocent  who  bear  his  name. 

I  have  said  "the  innocent."  but  I  am  afraid  I  shall  have  to 
withdraw  the  word.  But  I  will  not  withdraw  it  for  them  unless 
I  can  withdraw  it  for  us  all. 

There  has  been  a  good  deal  of  talk  among  the  respectable 
and  religious  people  who  were  scandalized  by  the  exposure  and 
the  conviction  of  these  men  concerning  the  causes  of  their  moral 
collapse.  I  do  not  believe  the  men  are  any  worse  men  today  in 
stripes  than  they  were  in  broadcloth  a  little  while  ago.  Nor  do 
T  think  that  they  are  being  punished  for  the  wrong  which  they 
did  so  much  as  they  are  for  the  wrong  way  in  which  they 
did  it.  They  might  have  been  worse  men  and  have  continued 
to  be  honored  both  in  church  and  in  society.  I  am  not  at  all 
certain  that  most  good  people  are  really  any  better  than  these 
men  are. 

Most  good  people  are  entirely  willing  to  live   luxuriously 


100. 

on  the  earnings  of  other  people.  Indeed,  that  is  the  way  most 
good  people  get  their  luxuries.  Gambling  is  not  necessarily 
dealing  in  cards,  or  betting  on  the  turn  of  the  wheel.  This 
much  we  are  willing  to  admit  today.  Taking  chances  of  any  kind 
some  people  would  say  is  gambling.  But  that  is  also  beside  the 
mark.  The  essence  of  gambling  is  the  willingness  to  take  other 
men's  money  without  earning  it,  to  get  something  for  nothing. 
That,  we  are  practically  all  of  us  willing  to  do.  The  favorite 
day  dream  of  nice,  respectable,  good  people  who  have  very  little 
money  is  getting  a  lot  without  earning  it,  and  "doing  good" 
with  a  portion  of  the  sweat  of  other  men's  toil.  As  for  those 
who  have  it  in  any  considerable  amount,  and  to  whom  we  cater 
in  all  sorts  of  ways  because  they  have  it,  almost  without  excep- 
tion they  got  it  by  playing  more  or  less  cleverly  some  game  in 
which  they  were  able  to  exploit  their  fellows.  Respectability, 
generally  speaking,  is  only  another  name  for  successful  para- 
sitism. Criminality  is  playing  the  game  violently  or  clumsily, 
so  that  you  are  caught  breaking  the  rules.  Even  the  breaking 
of  the  rules  isn't  so  serious  if  you  don't  get  caught  at  it.  "Pris- 
ons." as  the  small  boy  said,  "are  for  them  as  gets  kotched." 

One  of  the  men  who  joined  me  in  the  "Christian  Comrade" 
movement  in  San  Francisco  had  been  for  years  a  traveling 
man.  Although  brought  up  in  a  devout  home  he  got  to  drink- 
ing some  and  gambling.  lie  was  never  extreme  in  resj>ect  to 
either,  and  never  hccnme  disreputable.  Once,  in  talking  over 
this  part  of  his  experience,  he  told  me  graphically  of  an  eve- 
ning in  a  saloon  when  he  had  staked  a  good  deal  on  the  turn 
of  the  wheel,  atvl  how  he  prayed  earnestly  that  God  would 
prosper  his  fortune,  vowing  to  make  good  use  of  his  success 
if  he  won. 

"I  never  prayed  more  earnestly  or  more  sincerely  in  my 
life,"  he  said. 

Old  John  Newton,  afterward  a  very  noted  divine,  testified 
that  he  never  enjoyed  sweeter  fellowship  with  God  than  he 
did  on  some  of  his  early  voyages  when  he  was  returning  with 
the  hatches  of  his  ship  full  of  naked,  sick,  half-starved  and 
wholly  miserable  Africans  whom  he  sold  to  the  likewise  pious 
planters  at  a  splendid  profit.  His  goodness  was  sincere  enough, 
but  it  was  purely  personal,  and  had  no  consciousness  of  the 
moral  values  of  economic  considerations. 

I  cannot  see  that  John  Newton's  blindness  was  any  more 
dense  in  a  moral  way  than  that  of  respectable  and  religious 
people  who  can  enjoy  "touring  Kurope"  or  our  own  country, 
for  that  matter,  with  the  hatches  of  civilization  crowded  to 
the  death  with'  a  huddle  of  miserable  toilers  whose  sweat  is 


110. 

the  price  of  all  our  superior  possessions  and  ways. 

Nor  can  I  see  that  my  friends  who  are  at  San  Quentin 
for  misappropriating  other  people's  money  contrary  to  the  rules 
of  the  game  are  really  any  worse  in  their  stripes  than  they 
were  when  they  sat  at  the  banquet  board  with  a  lot  of  other 
respectable  parasites  and  studied  out  legal  ways  of  getting  a 
larger  share  for  themselves  of  what  other  men  had  produced. 

"So  you  would  like  to  be  good?"  said  Jesus  to  a  certain 
rich  young  man  who  had  a  good  deal  more  of  this  world  than 
he  had  ever  earned,  and  wanted  to  find  out  some  easy  way 
of  making  sure  of  the  next  world.  "And  you  tell  me  that 
you  have  lived  an  orderly,  respectable  life?  What  do  you 
know  about  goodness,  anyway,  that  you  pass  on  the  compli- 
ment so  lightly  to  me?  Nobody  but  God  has  ever  yet  got 
*  hold  of  what  goodness  really  is.  But  if  you  want  to  make  a 
decent  beginning  suppose  you  quit  living  on  other  people,  get 
rid  of  all  this  truck  that  you  don't  really  need  and  give  it  to 
those  who  do  need  it,  strip  yourself  down  to  yourself  and  join 
us  just  as  a  man  among  men  in  our  work  of  trying  to  build 
up  a  really  human  world." 

Do  you  wonder  that  with  all  his  ordinary  decency  and 
conventional  religiousness  the  young  man  promptly  turned  down 
the  proposition?  Or"  do  you  wonder  that  all  of  us  preachers 
and  all  the  rest  of  the  very  respectable  following  of  a  man 
who  -  was  esteemed  less  than  a  convict  in  his  day  have  been 
busy  ever  since  he  said  this  awkward  thing  in  trying  to  ex- 
plain it  away? 

The  ordinary  cant  of  goodness  is  bad  enough.  The  con- 
ceit with  which  we  sit  in  judgment  on  our  fellows  who  have 
been  .a  little  franker  in  their  wickedness  than  ourselves  is 
worse  yet.  The  cowardice  which  is  back  of  a  lot  of  our  de- 
cency which  makes  our  very  virtues  less  attractive  than  the 
more  daring  or  less  coldly  calculating  ways  of  some  who  there- 
by fall  into  trouble  is  likewise  to  our  discredit.  Our  content- 
ment all  along  the  line  with  half-way  goodness,  half-way  truth- 
fulness, half-way  progress  of  every  type  is  further  condemna- 
tion for  us.  I  confess  that  I  have  sinned  with  others  both 
better  and  worse  than  myself  at  all  these  points,  and  my  min- 
istry has  revealed  to  me  very  slowly  indeed,  and  through 
much  of  varying,  vacillating  mood  as  I  have  witnessed  in  these 
articles  how  cheap  a  thing  most  of  our  clatter  about  goodness 
is.  I  see  the  shallowness  of  it  all  so  self-convictingly  now  that 
I  hate  the  whole  condemnatory  system  by  which  we  sit  in 
judgment  on  sinners  whose  worst  condemnation  is  that  they 
are  so  very  much  like  the  rest  of  us  even  when  they  reform. 


111. 

But  the  most  pitiful  part  of  it  all  to  me  is  the  blindness 
which  we  continue  to  sit  on  the  backs  of  our  brothers 
while  we  whip  them  for  falling  down,  and  the  appearance  of 
sincerity  with  which  we  say  our  prayers  at  the  same  time  that 
we  are  going  through  our  weaker  brother's  pockets. 

One  of  the  members  of  my  congregation  here  is  a  Ger- 
man, who  speaks  broken  English.  He  is  not  a  member  of 
my  church.  He  was  brought  up  a  Lutheran.  His  pastor  took 
'him  to  task  for  not  attending  his  own  church  in  another  town. 
The  man  explained  by  trying  to  tell  his  social  convictions, 
which  are  radical. 

"Don't  you  know."  said  the  minister,  "that  if  you  neglect 
the  church  and  run  after  that  sort  of  thing  you  will  lose  your 
.soul  and  go  to  hell?" 

"Well,"  said  the  man.  with  eyes  full  of  great  sorrowful 
compassion,  "I'd  be  willing  enough  to  lose  my  soul  and  go  to 
hell  if  I  could  help  in  that  way  to  save  the  poor  people  of  this 
world  from  the  hell  in  which  so  many  of  them  are  living 
today." 

Convert  that  man !  I'd  be  glad  enough  if  I  could  convert 
ihe  preachers  themselves  to  that  kind  of  religion.  Nor  will  the 
goodness  of  the  world  ever  be  good  for  very  much  until  it 
feels  that  way. 

"The  rich  are  willing  to  do  anything  for  the  poor  except 
.to  get  off  their  backs,"  said  Tolstoi. 

Good  people  will  do  almost  anything  nowadays  for  the 
'bad  except  quit  the  profits  of  the  social  processes  which  make 
them  bad. 

Our  criminal  classes  are  not  our  dangerous  classes.  The 
I.  W.  W.'s,  foreign  labor,  the  agitators,  the  tramps  and  the 
hoboes  themselves  are  not  our  dangerous  classes.  Even  the 
"higher  ups"  whom  we  are  trying  vainly  to  reach  in  a  puni- 
tive way  are  not  the  sources  of  social  disturbance  and  unrest. 
If  we  could  catch  all  the  chief  capitalists  tomorrow  and  put 
them  in  jail  it  would  be  as  vain  as  killing  mosquitoes  and 
leaving  their  breeding  places  intact.  All  our  muck-raking  zeal 
against  individuals  whether  for  individual  or  for  social  offenses 
is  as  futile  as  swabbing  up  floors  with  the  faucets  turned  on. 
We  shall  have  to  keep  on  swabbing,  of  course,  until  we  have 
sense  enough  to  turn  off  the  faucets.  And  the  chief  reason 
that  we  keep  the  faucets  going  is  that  we  are  all  willing  to 
take  the  risk  of  mining  or  neighbors  if  we  can  get  unearned 
l>cnefits  for  ourselves. 

It  was  an  ancient  Greek  philosopher  who.  when  he  was 
asked  by  a  patronizing  king,  "What  can  I  do  tor.  you?"  re- 


112 

sponded  promptly,  "Get  out  of  my  sun." 

That  is  the  first  thing  that  good  people  need  to  do  for 
bad  people  today.  Go  on  with  your  piosities  if  you  please. 
Think  yourself  as  superior  to  others  as  you  will.  Stumble 
over  your  own  virtues  into  a  stupid  content  with  a  goodness 
which  has  not  yet  really  begun  to  be  good.  BUT  GET  OFF 
THE  BACKS  OF  THE  POOR! 

The  piety  of  our  day  is  still  the  piety  of  the  parasite.  The 
missionary  is  commonly  as  blind  to  it  as  the  "heathen"  whom 
the  supporters  of  the  missionary  are  rushing  to  exploit.  The 
slum  worker  pays  for  his  hymn  books  out  of  the  rent  that  only 
vice  itself  can  afford  to  pay.  The  evangelistic  minister  is  helped 
in  his  evangelism  by  the  very  men  who  are  doubling  ,their  div- 
idends by  halving  the  lives  of  his  converts.  The  religious 
editor  is  dependent  upon  all  kinds  of  irreligious  humbug  in  an 
economic  way.  Even  in  such  an  earthly  paradise  as  this  se- 
questered nook  the  only  chance  for  a  man  to  live  is  to  have 
stored  up  the  honey  of  other  men's  toil,  or  to  live  upon  those 
who  have  such  a  store.  There  is  plenty  of  chance  to  be  pious 
today.  It  is  the  hardest  thing  in  the  world  to  be  simply  just, 
to  stop  clinging  to  other  men's  backs  and  stand  on  your  own 
feet. 

I  am  a  parasite  myself,  living  on  what  other  men  pro- 
duce. The  little  that  T  have  in  property  is  all  "unearned  incre- 
ment," which  society  made  and  did  not  have  the  sense  to  keep. 
Had  I  devoted  myself  to  getting  more  I  need  not  have  worked 
half  as  hard  and  I  might  have  been  vastly  more  respectable, 
because  I  might  have  had  thousands  for  every  dollar  which  I 
have.  Some,  trying  to  get  such  thousands,  have  failed,  and 
are  unfortunates  to  be  pitied  now  and  suffer  our  charities. 
Some,  more  impatient  in  their  methods,  have  been  caught  and 
are  wearing  the  stripes.  Some  have  gotten  what  it  has  taken 
the  toil  of  thousands  to  produce,  and  when  they  come  to  church 
occasionally  everybody  is  breathlessly  hoping  they  will  be  good 
enough  to  give  us  a  part  of  the  spoil.  Some  of  us  have  only 
dreamed  of  such  successful  taking  toll  on  the  highways  of  life 
from  the  fruits  of  others'  labors.  But  our  goodness  .never 
seems  so  good  to  us  as  when  we  are  able  to  dress  ourselves 
in  fineries  which  we  have  taken  off  the  backs  of  the  poor. 

Suppose  Jesus  asked  us  to  strip  down  to  our  manhood  to- 
day and  begin  to  be  just  before  we  even  tried  to  be  good? 

Wno  says  that  the  men  in  stripes  would  be  any  more  un- 
willing to  work  real  social  justice  and  righteousness  than  our- 
selves, 


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THERE    IS    NO    SCHOOL    IN    THE    COUNTRY    JUST 

LIKE  IT. 

THE   MONTEZUMA    MOUNTAIN    RANCHE    SCHOOL 

FOR  BOYS. 

The  location  is  unsurpassed.  Five  miles  southwest  of  Los 
Gatos,  California,  in  the  Santa  Cruz  Mountains,  overlooking  a 
magnificent  panorama  of  natural  beauty,  at  an  elevation  of 
fifteen  hundred  feet  above  the  sea,  in  one  of  the  most  health- 
ful sections  of  the  Pacific  Coast.  The  boys  live  a  free,  out-of- 
door  life,  and  from  the  standpoint  of  physical  upbuilding  the 
school  is  worth  its  cost  if  you  want  your  boy  to  have  the  full 
use  of  his  body. 

We  make  a  specialty  of  sound,    scientific    sex    education;, 
building  our  brain  work  on  the  sure  foundation  of  an  uncwr^ 
rupted  body.     Every  boy  is  given  a  broad  and  strong  moral  1 
education   as   the   first   consideration   in   teaching   him   how   to« 
make  the  most  of  other  knowledge. 

We  have  worked  out  successfully  the  latest  and  best  ideair  , 
in  self-government,  and  the  boys  themselves  are  our-  afefcst  a.'  ,- 
sistants  along  all  lines. 

All  accommodations  taken  for  the  present,  but  we:  are 
building  to  take  in  a  few  more  boys.  If  you  wish  a  roc  AT  i  re- 
served, write  us  at  once.  / 

Address  E.  A.  ROGERS,  Principal  Montezrma  Sc\io»jl, 
Los  Gatos,  California,  y  t   j 


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